MetaFilter posts tagged with publichttp://www.metafilter.com/tags/public
Posts tagged with 'public' at MetaFilter.Wed, 07 Dec 2016 23:42:13 -0800Wed, 07 Dec 2016 23:42:13 -0800en-ushttp://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss60a perfect superposition of tragedy and farcehttp://www.metafilter.com/163854/a%2Dperfect%2Dsuperposition%2Dof%2Dtragedy%2Dand%2Dfarce
<a href="https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-why-it-didn-t-work">How the Soviets invented the internet and why it didn't work</a> - "Soviet scientists tried for decades to network their nation. What stalemated them is now fracturing the global internet." <blockquote>The first global computer networks took root in the US thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/EpicureanDeal/status/787789761444515840">well-regulated state funding</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Prof_Karthik_M/status/789275509674811392">collaborative research</a> environments, while the contemporary (and notably independent) national network efforts in the USSR floundered due to <a href="https://medium.com/startup-grind/fuck-you-startup-world-ab6cc72fad0e">unregulated competition</a> and <a href="https://cherokeegothic.com/2016/10/17/centralization-state-building-and-literature/">institutional infighting</a> among Soviet administrators. The first global computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like <a href="http://www.digitopoly.org/2016/10/20/wikipedia-and-political-discourse-the-new-hope/">cooperative socialists</a>, not socialists behaving like <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/silicon-valley-is-obsessed-with-a-false-notion-of-reality/503963/">competitive capitalists</a>.
In the fate of the Soviet internet we can glimpse a <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/11/bret-stephens-_2016s-big-reveal_-the-awful-election-of-2016-was-the-big-reveal-the-guiding-spirit-of-the.html">clear and present warning</a> to the <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/trump-will-have-no-shortage-of-options-for-attacking-net-neutrality/">future of the internet</a>. Today the 'internet' – understood as a single global network of networks for <a href="https://slowheart.com/blog/2016/nov/5/future-of-work-and-future-of-your-data/">advancing informational liberty</a>, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-09/brambles-partners-and-options">democracy</a> and <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/10/03/software-patents/">commerce</a> – is in serious decline... consider how often companies and states are seeking to silo their online experiences: the ubiquitous app is more of a walled garden for rent-seekers than a public commons for browsers. Inward-looking gravity wells (such as <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602493/mark-zuckerbergs-long-march-to-china/">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-plan-to-organize-its-whole-society-around-big-data-a-rating-for-everyone/2016/10/20/1cd0dd9c-9516-11e6-ae9d-0030ac1899cd_story.html">the Chinese firewall</a>) increasingly gobble up sites that link outwards.</blockquote>
also btw...
<ul><li><a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/11/economist-explains-11">What is the 'splinternet'?</a> - "THE word—and the concept—is not new. An entire <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21695370-how-internet-lost-its-free-spirit-growing-up">book</a> has been written about it. But it is likely to find <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/business/dealbook/technology-start-ups-to-get-a-license-to-bank.html">greater currency</a> in the coming years: '<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/tags/splinternet">splinternet</a>', or the idea that the internet, <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/122424/Magna-Carta-2-promote-the-general-welfare">long imagined</a> as a <a href="http://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/">global online commons</a>, is becoming a maze of national or regional and often conflicting rules. <a href="http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201510021000">Elders of the internet</a>—among them politicians, entrepreneurs and <a href="http://www.decentralizedweb.net/people/">technologists</a> who want the network to <a href="http://www.decentralizedweb.net/learn-more/">remain open</a>—have <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html">started to push</a> back."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/02/the-associated-press-how-a-trump-administration-could-shape-the-internet.html">How a Trump Administration Could Shape the Internet</a> - "Under a President Donald Trump, cable and phone companies could gain new power to influence what you do and what you watch online — not to mention how much privacy you have while you're at it."</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.163854Wed, 07 Dec 2016 23:42:13 -0800kliulessSocialize Financehttp://www.metafilter.com/163807/Socialize%2DFinance
<a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6674.html">The economic geography of a universal basic income</a> - "An underdiscussed virtue of a <a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2015/09/ethereumsv-ubi-talk-light-reedit.pdf">universal basic income</a> is that it would counter geographic inequality even more powerfully than it blunts conventional income inequality. By a '<a href="http://www.coppolacomment.com/2016/11/reinventing-work-for-future.html">universal basic income</a>', I mean the simple policy of having the Federal government cut periodic checks of identical dollar amounts to every adult citizen, wherever they may live. Importantly, a <a href="http://continuations.com/post/153042464180/whats-next">universal basic income</a> would not be calibrated to the local cost of living. Residents of Manhattan would receive the same dollar amount as residents of Cleveland. But a dollar in Cleveland stretches much farther than the same dollar in Manhattan..." <blockquote>At the margin, for those willing to let economics guide their choice of home, UBI would shift demand from expensive capitals to <a href="http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/the-great-cooling">cheaper</a> mid-sized cities, and take some of the pressure off of <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/america-states-world-largest-economies/">powerhouse city</a> housing markets. A UBI would tilt the <a href="https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler/status/762407402264158208">residential playing field</a> towards a country with <a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2013/02/what-makes-some-cities-vote-democratic/4598/">lots of vibrant, geographically dispersed cities</a> rather than a few '<a href="http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/2015/11/housing-series-part-77-housing-is.html">closed-access</a>' capitals.</blockquote>
also btw...
<ul><li><a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/finance-banks-capitalism-markets-socialism-planning/">We already live in a planned economy. Why not make it a democratic one?</a> - "At its most basic level, finance is simply bookkeeping — a record of money obligations and commitments. But finance is also a form of planning — a set of institutions for allocating claims on the social product."</li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/asymptosis/status/804130901114388480">Fedwire for All</a> - "The credit card system is really a protection racket. No merchant can afford to say no. The Fed should do those xfers for free."<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/160387/The-Uncanny-Mind-That-Built-Ethereum#6570582">*</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjiwIaMjt_QAhVCrlQKHReUDRIQFggcMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fchinas-new-tool-for-social-control-a-credit-rating-for-everything-1480351590&usg=AFQjCNHj57OpdJzBxzcNEB_D6DcLk8cB8w&sig2=O2mL-t2uTQ-Eb7ckcfz66Q">China's New Tool for Social Control: A Credit Rating for Everything</a> - "The national social-credit system's aim, according to a slogan repeated in planning documents, is to 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.' "</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.163807Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:06:54 -0800kliulessScientific Motherhoodhttp://www.metafilter.com/163627/Scientific%2DMotherhood
<blockquote>A well-stocked and carefully curated medicine cabinet conveyed care and successful home management, while an overstuffed or unconsidered one ran afoul of received ideals of motherhood. Yet while women were responsible for the cabinet's care and contents, certain products essential to their own health and hygiene were long thought to be inimical to it.</blockquote>
<a href="http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/60/kastner_day.php">
A feminist cultural history of the medicine cabinet</a>, an interview with <a href="http://deannaday.net/about/">Dr. Deanna Day</a>. tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.163627Sat, 26 Nov 2016 23:02:02 -0800RumpleDataism: Getting out of the 'job loop' and into the 'knowledge loop'http://www.metafilter.com/162131/Dataism%2DGetting%2Dout%2Dof%2Dthe%2Djob%2Dloop%2Dand%2Dinto%2Dthe%2Dknowledge%2Dloop
<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/2/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c.html">From deities to data</a> - "For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people... Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so <a href="http://www.andygranowitz.com/2015/02/24/yuval-harari-techno-religions-silicon-prophets.html">high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets</a> are creating a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh1MUVwHqvU">new universal narrative</a> that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data." <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harai-dataism">Privileging the right of information to circulate freely</a> - "There's an emerging market called Dataism, which venerates neither gods nor man - <a href="https://forwearemany.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/sandkings.pdf">it worships data</a>. From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a <a href="https://www.quora.com/Do-animals-fight-wars-and-if-so-what-was-the-largest-war/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin">single data-processing system</a>, <a href="http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/12/Superhumanintelligence.shtml">with individual humans serving</a> as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system... Like capitalism, Dataism too began as a neutral scientific theory, but is now mutating into a religion that claims to determine right and wrong... Just as capitalists believe that all good things depend on economic growth, so Dataists believe all good things - including economic growth - depend on the freedom of information."
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review">Our unparalleled ability to control the world around us is turning us into something new</a> - "We have achieved these triumphs by <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/10/12/cesar-hidalgo-on-personbytes-and-knowledge-networks/">building ever more complex networks</a> that treat <a href="http://timharford.com/2015/06/teamwork-gives-us-added-personbyte/">human beings as units of information</a>. Evolutionary science teaches us that, in one sense, we are nothing but data-processing machines: we too are algorithms. By manipulating the data we can exercise mastery over our fate."
<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5bfee114-69ea-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea034f.html">Planet of the apps</a> - "Many of the themes of his first book are reprised: the importance of the cognitive revolution and the power of collaboration in speeding the <a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/12/08/the-evolution-of-imagination/">ascent</a> of <a href="http://ritholtz.com/2013/12/the-hierarchy-of-innovation/">Man</a>; the essential power of myths — such as religion and money — in sustaining our civilisations; and the inexcusable brutality with which our species treats other animals. But having run out of history to write about, Harari is forced to turn his face to the future... 'Forget economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions: in order to raise global happiness levels, we need to manipulate human biochemistry'... For the moment, <a href="http://www.coppolacomment.com/2016/09/austerity-and-rise-of-populism.html">the rise of populism</a>, the rickety architecture of the European Union, the turmoil in the Middle East and the competing claims on the South China Sea will consume most politicians' attention. But at some time soon, our societies will collectively need to learn far more about these fast-developing technologies and think far more deeply about their potential use."
also btw...
<ul><li><a href="https://omni.media/preparing-for-our-posthuman-future-of-artificial-intelligence">Preparing for our Posthuman Future of Artificial Intelligence</a> - "By exploring the recent books on the dilemmas of AI and Human Augmentation, how can we better prepare for (and understand) the posthuman future? By David Brin." (omni o)</li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/772566633646874625">The Man-Machine Myth</a> - "Beliefs inspired by the cybernetic mythos have a quasi-theological character: They tend to be faith-based."</li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/759419358749728768">Unsettling thought of the day</a></li>
<blockquote>Each technological age seems to have a "natural" system of government that's the most stable and common... Anyway, now we've entered a new technological age: the information age. What is the "natural" system of government for this age?<br> <br>An increasing number of countries now seem to be opting for a new sort of illiberal government - the style of Putin and the CCP. This new thing - call it Putinism - combines capitalism, a "deep state" of government surveillance, and social/cultural fragmentation.<br> <br>It's obviously way too early to tell, but there's an argument to be made that Putinism is the natural system of government now. New technology fragments the media, causing people to rally to sub-national identity groups instead of to the nation-state.<br> <br>The Putinist "deep state" commands the heights of power with universal surveillance, and allies with some rent-collecting corporations. Meanwhile, IF automation decreases labor's share of income and makes infantry obsolete, the worker/soldier class becomes less valuable.<br> <br>"People power" becomes weak because governments can suppress any rebellion with drones, surveillance, and other expensive weaponry. Workers can strike, but - huge hypothetical assumption alert! - they'll just be replaced, their bargaining power low due to automation.<br> <br>In sum: Powerful authoritarian governments, fragmented society, capitalism, "Hybrid warfare", and far less liberty.</blockquote>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/NoUsNoThemNoWe/status/759472642999066624">The Totalitarian</a> - "Putinist models seem to curtail personal freedom and self-expression. Chases away innovation class. In the long run this makes them unable to keep up with more innovative, open societies. But innovative open societies are also fissiparous in the long run. They need a strong centralized, even authoritarian, core. To wit the big democracies also have <a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/765220011862548480">deep states</a>, just ones that infringe on domestic public life less than Putinist do. Automation makes mass citizenry superfluous as soldiers, workers or taxpayers. The insiders' club is ever-shrinking. Steady state of AI era is grim. One demigod and 10 billion corpses/brain-in-jars depending on humanism quotient of the one. The three pillars for this end state are strong AI, mind uploading/replication, and mature molecular nanotechnology."</li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e46e8c00-6b72-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c.html">Capitalism and Democracy: The Strain Is Showing</a> - "Confidence in an enduring marriage between liberal democracy and global capitalism seems unwarranted."</li>
<blockquote>So what might take its place? One possibility[:] ... a global plutocracy and so in effect the end of national democracies. As in the Roman empire, the forms of republics might endure but the reality would be gone.<br> <br>An opposite alternative would be the rise of illiberal democracies or outright plebiscitary dictatorships... [like] Russia and Turkey. Controlled national capitalism would then replace global capitalism. Something rather like that happened in the 1930s. It is not hard to identify western politicians who would love to go in exactly this direction.<br> <br>Meanwhile, those of us who wish to preserve both liberal democracy and global capitalism must confront serious questions. One is whether it makes sense to promote further international agreements that tightly constrain national regulatory discretion in the interests of existing corporations... Above all... economic policy must be orientated towards promoting the interests of the many not the few; in the first place would be the citizenry, to whom the politicians are accountable. If we fail to do this, the basis of our political order seems likely to founder. That would be good for no one. The marriage of liberal democracy with capitalism needs some nurturing. It must not be taken for granted.</blockquote>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cc70de98-72aa-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35.html">G20 takes up global inequality challenge</a> - "Even before the final communiqué is drafted for the annual G20 summit the leaders of the world's largest economies already seemed to agree on their most pressing priority: to find a way to sell the benefits of globalisation to an increasingly sceptical public. As they arrived in the Chinese city of Hangzhou over the weekend, many were on the defensive amid a welter of familiar complaints back home: frustratingly slow growth, rising social inequality and the scourge of corporate tax avoidance."</li>
<blockquote>"Growth drivers from the previous round of technological progress are fading while a new technological and industrial revolution has yet to gain momentum," Mr Xi said at the start of the G20, adding that the global economy was at a "critical juncture".<br> <br>"Here at the G20 we will continue to pursue an agenda of inclusive and sustainable growth," Mr Obama said, acknowledging that "the international order is under strain".<br> <br>Mr Xi, whose country has arguably benefited more than any other from globalisation, struck a similarly cautious note in a weekend speech to business leaders. In China, he said, "we will make the pie bigger and make sure people get a fairer share of it".<br> <br>He also recognised global inequity, noting that the global gini coefficient — the standard measure of inequality — had raced past what he called its "alarm level" of 0.6 and now stood at 0.7. "We need to build a more inclusive world economy," Mr Xi said.</blockquote>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/70732cf4-7368-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35.html">G20 leaders urged to 'civilise capitalism'</a> - "Chinese president Xi Jinping helped set the tone of this year's G20 meeting in a weekend address to business executives. 'Development is for the people, it should be <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-37273238">pursued by the people</a> and its outcomes should be shared by the people', Mr Xi said... Before the two-day meeting, the US government argued that a '<a href="https://twitter.com/Brad_Setser/status/771789430289989632">public bandwagon</a>' was growing to ditch austerity in favour of fiscal policy support. 'Maybe the Germans are not absolutely cheering for it but there is a growing awareness that '<a href="https://twitter.com/Brad_Setser/status/772948003472769024">fiscal space</a>' has to be used to a much greater extent', agreed Ángel Gurría, secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development."</li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/L__Macfarlane/status/772826115991822336">Martin Wolf calls for basic income, land taxation &amp; intellectual property reform</a>: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dfe218d6-9038-11e3-a776-00144feab7de.html">Enslave the robots and free the poor</a></li>
<blockquote>The rise of intelligent machines is a moment in history. It will change many things, including our economy. But their potential is clear: they will <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanavent/status/768837587834372098">make it possible</a> for human beings to live far better lives. Whether they end up doing so depends on how the gains are produced and distributed. It is possible that the ultimate result will be a tiny minority of huge winners and a vast number of losers. But such an outcome would be a choice not a destiny. A form of techno-feudalism is unnecessary. Above all, technology itself does not dictate the outcomes. <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/761247210650554369">Economic and political institutions do</a>. If the ones we have do not give the results we want, we must change them.</blockquote>
<li><a href="http://continuations.com/post/149980165245/labor-day-from-the-job-loop-to-the-knowledge-loop">From the Job Loop to the Knowledge Loop (via Universal Basic Income)</a> - "We work so we can buy stuff. The more we work, the more we can buy. And the more is available to buy, the more of an incentive there is to work. We have been led to believe that one cannot exist without the other. At the macro level we are obsessed with growth (or lack thereof) in consumption and employment. At the individual level we spend the bulk of our time awake working and much of the rest of it consuming."</li>
<blockquote>I see it differently. The real lack of imagination is to think that we must be stuck in the job loop simply because we have been in it for a century and a half. This is to confuse the existing system with humanity's purpose.<br> <br>Labor is not what humans are here for. Instead of the job loop we should be spending more of our time and attention in the <a href="http://continuations.com/post/149364248835/tech-tuesday-revisited-index">knowledge loop</a> [learn-&gt;create-&gt;share]... if we do not continue to <a href="http://continuations.com/post/149749604760/uncertainty-wednesday-a-new-series">generate knowledge</a> we will all suffer a fate similar to previous human societies that have gone nearly extinct, <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/124310/Easter-Island-is-not-Earth">such as</a> the <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/134630/What-Happened-on-Easter-Island">Easter Islanders</a>. There are tremendous threats, eg climate change and infectious disease, and opportunities, eg machine learning and individualized medicine, ahead of us. Generating more knowledge is how we defend against the threats and seize the opportunities.</blockquote>
<li><a href="http://continuations.com/post/149463456520/my-gel-2016-talk-video">What's more scarce: money, or attention?</a> - "Attention is now the scarce resource."</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.162131Wed, 07 Sep 2016 23:42:24 -0800kliulessAuditing Algorithms and Algorithmic Auditinghttp://www.metafilter.com/162085/Auditing%2DAlgorithms%2Dand%2DAlgorithmic%2DAuditing
<a href="http://www.breakingviews.com/features/review-big-datas-all-too-human-failings/">How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy</a> - "A former academic mathematician and ex-hedge fund quant exposes flaws in how information is used to assess everything from creditworthiness to policing tactics, with results that cause damage both financially and to the fabric of society. Programmed biases and a lack of feedback are among the concerns behind the clever and apt title of <a href="https://mathbabe.org/">Cathy O'Neil</a>'s book: <i><a href="https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com/">Weapons of Math Destruction</a></i>." <i>"Cathy O'Neil has seen Big Data from the inside, and the picture isn't pretty.</i> Weapons of Math Destruction <i>opens the curtain on algorithms that exploit people and distort the truth while posing as neutral mathematical tools. This book is wise, fierce, and desperately necessary."</i> —[<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/user/21049">mefi's own</a>] Jordan Ellenberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of <i><a href="http://www.metafilter.com/activity/21049/posts/projects/">How Not To Be Wrong</a></i>
<a href="https://mathbabe.org/2016/09/01/excerpt-of-my-book-in-the-guardian/">Excerpt</a>: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/01/how-algorithms-rule-our-working-lives">How algorithms rule our working lives</a> - "Employers are turning to mathematically modelled ways of sifting through job applications. Even when wrong, their verdicts seem beyond dispute – and they tend to punish the poor."
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-24/a-math-nerd-wants-to-stop-the-big-data-monster">The 'Rithm is Gonna Get You</a> - "MathBabe Cathy O'Neil is out to stop the Big Data monster."
<blockquote>The decision to leave her job as a tenure-track math professor at Barnard College and join hedge fund D.E. Shaw in 2007 seemed like a no-brainer. Cathy O'Neil would apply her math skills to the financial markets and make three times the pay. What could go wrong?
Less than a year later, subprime mortgages imploded, the financial crisis set in, and so-called math wizards were targets for blame. "The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all that had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas," she writes...
The book chronicles O'Neil's odyssey from math-loving nerd clutching a Rubik's Cube to <a href="http://altbanking.net/">Occupy Wall Streeter</a> pushing for banking reform; along the way, she learns how algorithms—models used by governments, schools, and companies to find patterns in data—can produce nasty, or at least unintended, consequences (the WMDs of her title).</blockquote>
<a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/review-weapons-of-math-destruction/">If we develop the will, we can use big data to advance equality and justice</a> - "Weapons of math destruction, which O'Neil refers to throughout the book as WMDs, are mathematical models or algorithms that claim to quantify important traits: teacher quality, recidivism risk, creditworthiness but have harmful outcomes and often reinforce inequality, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. They have three things in common: opacity, scale, and damage. They are often proprietary or otherwise shielded from prying eyes, so they have the effect of being a black box. They affect large numbers of people, increasing the chances that they get it wrong for some of them. And they have a negative effect on people, perhaps by encoding racism or other biases into an algorithm or enabling predatory companies to advertise selectively to vulnerable people, or even by causing a global financial crisis."
<a href="http://time.com/4471451/cathy-oneil-math-destruction/">This Mathematician Says Big Data Is Causing a 'Silent Financial Crisis'</a> - "Like the dark financial arts employed in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, the Big Data algorithms that sort us into piles of 'worthy' and 'unworthy' are mostly opaque and unregulated, not to mention generated (and used) by large multinational firms with huge lobbying power to keep it that way."
more from mathbabe...
<ul><li><a href="https://mathbabe.org/2016/07/27/reform-the-cfaa/">Reform the CFAA</a> - "The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is <a href="http://continuations.com/post/149178213205/the-terrible-no-good-cfaa-giving-more-power-to">badly in need of reform</a>... Specifically, the CFAA keeps researchers from understanding how algorithms work."</li>
<li><a href="https://mathbabe.org/2016/08/11/donald-trump-is-like-a-biased-machine-learning-algorithm/">Donald Trump is like a biased machine learning algorithm</a> - "The reason I bring this up: first of all, it's a great way of understanding how machine learning algorithms can give us stuff we absolutely don't want, even though they fundamentally lack prior agendas."</li>
<li><a href="https://mathbabe.org/2016/07/22/auditing-algorithms/">Auditing Algorithms</a> - "I've started a company called ORCAA, which stands for O'Neil Risk Consulting and Algorithmic Auditing and is pronounced 'orcaaaaaa'. ORCAA will audit algorithms and conduct risk assessments for algorithms, first as a consulting entity and eventually, if all goes well, as a more formal auditing firm, with open methodologies and toolkits."</li>
<li><a href="https://mathbabe.org/2016/07/11/when-is-ai-appropriate/">When is AI appropriate?</a> - "The short version of my answer is, AI can be made appropriate if it's thoughtfully done, but most AI shops are <a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/771322585158127617">not set up to be at all thoughtful</a> about how it's done."</li>
<li><a href="https://mathbabe.org/2016/07/25/horrifying-new-credit-scoring-in-china/">Horrifying New Credit Scoring in China</a> - "ZestFinance is the American company, led by ex-Googler Douglas Merrill who likes to say 'all data is credit data'... <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12725804/baidu-machine-learning-open-source-paddle">Baidu is the Google of China</a>. So they have a shit ton of browsing history on people. Things like, 'symptoms for Hepatitis' or 'how do I get a job'. In other words, the <a href="http://a16z.com/2016/07/24/money-as-message/">company collects information</a> on a person's most vulnerable hopes and fears. Now put these two together, which they already did thankyouverymuch, and you've got a toxic cocktail of personal information, on the one hand, and absolutely no hesitation in using information against people, on the other."</li>
<li><a href="https://mathbabe.org/2016/05/17/white-house-report-on-big-data-and-civil-rights/">White House report on big data and civil rights</a> - "Last week the White House issued a report entitled <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/04/big-risks-big-opportunities-intersection-big-data-and-civil-rights">Big Risks, Big Opportunities: the Intersection of Big Data and Civil Rights</a>. Specifically, the authors were United States C.T.O. <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/author/megan-smith">Megan Smith</a>, Chief Data Scientist <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/author/dj-patil">DJ Patil</a>, and <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/author/cecilia-mu%C3%B1oz">Cecilia Munoz</a>, who is Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council. It is a remarkable report, and covered a lot in 24 readable pages. I was especially excited to see the following paragraph in <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/04/big-risks-big-opportunities-intersection-big-data-and-civil-rights">the summary of the report</a>: 'Using case studies on credit lending, employment, higher education, and criminal justice, the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/2016_0504_data_discrimination.pdf">report we are releasing today</a> illustrates how big data techniques can be used to detect bias and prevent discrimination. It also demonstrates the risks involved, particularly how technologies can deliberately or inadvertently perpetuate, exacerbate, or mask discrimination'. The <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/2016_0504_data_discrimination.pdf">report itself</a> is broken up into an abstract discussion of algorithms, which for example debunks the widely held assumption that algorithms are objective, discusses problems of biased training data, and discusses problems of opacity, unfairness, and disparate impact."</li>
<li><a href="https://mathbabe.org/2016/06/03/three-ideas-for-defusing-weapons-of-math-destruction/">Three Ideas for defusing Weapons of Math Destruction</a> - "1) Use open datasets; 2) Take manual curation seriously; 3) Demand causal models."</li></ul>
also btw...
<ul><li><a href="https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/randomwalker/the-workshop-on-data-and-algorithmic-transparency/">The workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency</a> - "From online advertising to Uber to predictive policing, <a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/763390691884040194">algorithmic</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/763061056189104129">systems</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/770249954447286272">powered</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/nicolasterry/status/766964589716090880">personal data</a> affect <a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/763105465580589056">more and more</a> of our lives. As our <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2750148">society begins to grapple</a> with the consequences of this shift, empirical investigation of these systems has proved vital to understand the potential for <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/opinion/the-real-bias-built-in-at-facebook.html">discrimination</a>, <a href="http://elaineou.com/2016/08/17/linkedin-vs-the-bots/">privacy breaches</a>, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/opinion/campaign-stops/the-election-wont-be-rigged-but-it-could-be-hacked.html">vulnerability to manipulation</a>."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.information-age.com/it-management/risk-and-compliance/123461954/why-gdpr-catalyst-global-digital-transformation">Why GDPR is the catalyst for a global digital transformation</a> - "The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which <a href="https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/760954763726901248">all businesses must comply</a> with by 2018, will trigger the next wave of global digital transformation... Recently, Facebook had to ensure that the data it had collected on EU citizens wasn't being misused in the US. The ruling resulted in US firms scrambling to get their <a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/763880621064261632">data agreements</a> in order and ensure the safe sharing of data."</li>
<li><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/this-company-has-built-a-profile-on-every-american-adult">This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult</a> - "For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person's car—and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it's weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior. IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company's database service, idiCORE, combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn't waiting for requests from clients—it's already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn't be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.full-stop.net/2016/08/10/features/essays/jacobsilverman/what-machines-know-surveillance-anxiety-and-digitizing-the-world/">What Machines Know: Surveillance Anxiety and Digitizing the World</a> - "Who I think I am doesn't matter — what matters is what the algorithms of Google, my potential employer, my health insurer, and the Department of Homeland Security say I am."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/upshot/ban-the-box-an-effort-to-stop-discrimination-may-actually-increase-it.html">Ban the Box? An Effort to Stop Discrimination May Actually Increase It</a> - "<a href="https://twitter.com/jenniferdoleac/status/766848697204301824">Research suggests</a> that unintended consequences may foil well-intentioned policies."</li>
<li><a href="http://smerity.com/articles/2016/algorithms_can_be_prejudiced.html">It's ML, not magic: machine learning can be prejudiced</a> - "<a href="https://twitter.com/FrankPasquale/status/763038091753947136">If we're not careful</a>, optimizing life for some will be equivalent to handicapping life for others."</li>
<li><a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279927">Machine Learning Needs Bias Training to Overcome Stereotypes</a> - "It's time for the risks of social bias to be <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08196">embedded deeply</a> in data science codes of ethics and education."</li>
<li><a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2016/02/05/bittersweet-mysteries-of-machine-learning-a-provocation/">The complexity of machine learning does not make it unregulable</a> - "For the most <i>laissez-faire</i> commentators in the debate on algorithmic accountability, each step in the process of algorithmic ordering is immune from legal contestation or inspection: 1) the data gathered for processing are protected as trade secrets, 2) the processing itself is too complex for any human to understand, and 3) its outputs are 'free expression', exempt from ordinary legal restrictions. I have disputed 1) and 3) in other work, and in this provocation I deem 2) the '<a href="https://pressron.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-computation/">sweet mystery of machine learning</a>' approach to deflecting regulation... Even if algorithms at the heart of these processes '<a href="http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/is-artificial-intelligence-permanently-inscrutable">transcend all understanding</a>', we can inspect the inputs (data) that go into them, restrict the contexts in which they are used, and demand outputs that avoid disparate impacts."</li>
<li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2016/aug/11/numbers-dont-need-to-be-trusted-to-shape-our-lives-they-just-need-our-attention-bbc">Numbers don't need to be trusted to shape our lives: they just need our attention</a> - "With the escalating use of metrics across all areas of our lives, we have seen the power of numbers shifting from being about faith to being about persuasion. It is no longer what numerical measures tell us, but what metrics <i>tell us to do</i>. When we look at the way that numbers are used, we see <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1216147">increasingly calculative modes of reasoning</a> deployed in our workplaces, in our consumer behaviour, and in determining whether schools, hospitals, universities, countries are failing or succeeding."</li>
<li><a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/07/29/a-famed-hacker-is-grading-thousands-of-programs-and-may-revolutionize-software-in-the-process/">A Famed Hacker Is Grading Thousands of Programs — and May Revolutionize Software in the Process</a> - "Mudge and his wife, Sarah, a former NSA mathematician, have developed a first-of-its-kind method for testing and scoring the security of software — a method inspired partly by Underwriters Laboratories, that century-old entity responsible for the familiar circled UL seal that tells you your toaster and hair dryer have been tested for safety and won't burst into flames. Called the Cyber Independent Testing Lab, the Zatkos' operation won't tell you if your software is literally incendiary, but it will give you a way to comparison-shop browsers, applications, and antivirus products according to <a href="https://medium.com/@avsa/the-truth-about-the-fork-fd040c7ca955">how hardened they are</a> against attack. It may also push software makers to improve their code to avoid a low score and remain competitive."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/opinion/make-algorithms-accountable.html">Make Algorithms Accountable</a> - "We need more due process protections to assure the accuracy of the algorithms that have become ubiquitous in our lives."</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.162085Tue, 06 Sep 2016 00:24:25 -0800kliulessThe Court That Rules The Worldhttp://www.metafilter.com/161971/The%2DCourt%2DThat%2DRules%2DThe%2DWorld
<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/super-court">International investors have a private court of appeal even in criminal matters</a> - "A parallel legal universe, open only to corporations and largely invisible to everyone else, helps executives convicted of crimes escape punishment. [<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/08/30/how-isds-playground-ultra-wealthy-corrupt-and-criminal">ISDS</a>] operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret." (<a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/770309121446965248">via</a>) <blockquote>"Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum. Based on exclusive reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and Asia, BuzzFeed News has found the following:
<ul><li>A Dubai real estate mogul and former business partner of Donald Trump was sentenced to prison for collaborating on a deal that would swindle the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars — but then he turned to ISDS and got his prison sentence wiped away.</li>
<li>In El Salvador, a court found that a factory had poisoned a village — including dozens of children — with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the toxic metal from seeping out. But the factory owners' lawyers used ISDS to help the company dodge a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the area and providing needed medical care.</li>
<li>Two financiers convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from an Indonesian bank used an ISDS finding to fend off Interpol, shield their assets, and effectively nullify their punishment.</li></ul>
When the US Congress votes on whether to give final approval to the sprawling Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Barack Obama staunchly supports, it will be deciding on a massive expansion of ISDS. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton oppose the overall treaty, but they have focused mainly on what they say would be the loss of American jobs. Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine, has voiced concern about ISDS in particular, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren has lambasted it. Last year, members of both houses of Congress tried to keep it out of the Pacific trade deal. They failed."</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/globalsupercourt">Secrets of a Global Super Court Part Two</a>: <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/the-billion-dollar-ultimatum">The Billion-Dollar Ultimatum</a> - "International corporations that want to intimidate countries have access to a private legal system designed just for them. And to unlock its power, sometimes all it takes is a threat." tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.161971Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:34:47 -0800kliulessYour Call: A young black man's educationhttp://www.metafilter.com/161851/Your%2DCall%2DA%2Dyoung%2Dblack%2Dmans%2Deducation
<a href="https://www.thenation.com/authors/mychal-denzel-smith/">Mychal Denzel Smith</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/mychalsmith">author of</a> <i>Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching</i>, <a href="http://kalw.org/post/your-call-young-black-mans-education ">discusses his new book</a>: "We have to be willing to let go of the things that we think that we like about ourselves because if they are things that deny others access to respect and dignity and humanity, then they're not things worth having. So we have to be willing to let go." (<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/160804/When-Black-Lives-Stop-Mattering#6598452">MDS</a>: <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/130661/Kiese-Laymon-may-be-the-best-writer-and-curator-in-a-generation">previously</a>) <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-alicia-garza-interview-issue/">Alicia Garza</a>: "Lots of people who are great people are implementing and protecting systems, practices, structures that fundamentally exclude, disenfranchise, marginalize black people."
also btw (the '<a href="https://medium.com/@jomicheII/on-heterodox-macroeconomics-bcbad99ff34">NKs</a>' are making waves...)
<ul><li><a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/08/the-feds-effect-on-black-americans.html">The Fed's Effect on Black Americans</a> - "The U.S. Federal Reserve appears to be paying more attention to how its policies affect black Americans. This is a wise move... The Fed rightly aims to pursue policies that are best for the economy as a whole. But I don't believe that it will be seen as truly representative of all Americans unless it understands the differential impact of its policy choices on key demographic subgroups."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-reform-idUSKCN10X21T">Federal Reserve under growing pressure to reform system, goals</a> - "Fed Up, a network of community organizations and labor unions that wants a more diverse, transparent and income-inequality aware central bank, will meet with Kansas City Fed President Esther George... Currently 11 of the 12 regional Fed presidents are white, 10 are male, and none are black or Latino. At the Board level, the highest echelons of the Fed, Yellen is the first woman chair in the central bank's 103-year history."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-kashkari-race-idUSKCN10E2OJ">Minneapolis Fed chief Neel Kashkari says racial economic gap needs forceful response</a> - "A U.S. central banker on Wednesday pledged to devote more resources to addressing economic disparities between black and white Americans, saying the high rate of unemployment among African Americans is 'really troubling'... <a href="http://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-fed-chief-neel-kashkari-calls-some-racial-disparity-a-crisis/389132821/">Kashkari</a>, a former Republican candidate for California governor, is the son of Indian immigrants and the only one of 17 Fed policy-makers nationwide who is not white."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.fastcoexist.com/3062525/the-movement-for-black-lives-gets-behind-a-universal-basic-income">The Movement For Black Lives Gets Behind A Universal Basic Income</a> - "No other social or economic <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/161341/The-movement-for-Black-lives">policy solution</a> today would be of <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/reparations/">sufficient scale</a> to eradicate the profound and systematic economic inequities affecting black communities."</li>
<li><a href="http://rooseveltinstitute.org/rewrite-racial-rules-building-inclusive-american-economy/">Rewrite the Racial Rules: Building an Inclusive American Economy</a> - "In order to understand racial and economic inequality among black Americans, we must acknowledge the racial rules that undergird our economy and society. Those rules—laws, policies, institutions, regulations, and normative practices—are the driving force behind the patently unequal life chances and opportunities for too many individuals. <a href="http://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Structural-Discrimination-Final.pdf">In this report</a>, Andrea Flynn, Dorian Warren, Felicia Wong, and Susan Holmberg examine the racial rules across six different dimensions: income, wealth, education, criminal justice, health, and democratic participation. Ultimately, we show why the <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/161761/Democrats-we-put-the-fun-back-in-funding">rules structuring our economy</a> matter for the well-being of black Americans. And, against the backdrop of stark racial economic inequality dating back centuries, we make the case for pushing past both explicit and implicit exclusions, as well as ostensible race-neutrality."</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.161851Thu, 25 Aug 2016 00:34:38 -0800kliulessHow do we increase accessibility?http://www.metafilter.com/161501/How%2Ddo%2Dwe%2Dincrease%2Daccessibility
<a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/what-works/">What Works</a>: <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/what-works-denver-rail-system-growth-213905?paginate=false">The Train That Saved Denver</a> - "How Denver overcame regional factionalism to build a rail system that is a model for 21st century growth... it all happened, Hickenlooper and others note, because Coloradans across the base of the Front Range were willing to set aside crippling rivalries and make some <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-26/finding-better-ideas-to-rebuild-america">big collective investments</a> in themselves." (viz. <a href="http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/01/revolution-in-travel-habits.html">Spain</a>, cf. <a href="http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/high-speed-rail/article36319920.html">California</a> &amp; <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/10/florida-high-speed-railway-being-built-in-california.html">Florida</a>; <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/741371744615866368">via</a>) also btw...
<a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9118199/public-transportation-subway-buses">The real reason American public transportation is such a disaster</a> - "Canada has twice as much transit as the US. Why? Canadian cities treat it as a <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/762697314179788800">vital public utility</a>. Most American policymakers — and voters — see transit as a social welfare program." tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.161501Mon, 08 Aug 2016 21:54:23 -0800kliulessMissouri governor appointed as a public defender to an indigenthttp://www.metafilter.com/161399/Missouri%2Dgovernor%2Dappointed%2Das%2Da%2Dpublic%2Ddefender%2Dto%2Dan%2Dindigent
<a href="http://www.publicdefender.mo.gov/Newsfeed/Delegation_of_Representation.PDF">As authorized by law, the director of the Missouri State Public Defender office just used his authority to appoint the state's governor, Jay Nixon, as public defender counsel to an indigent.</a> The director is authorized to appoint *any* member of the state bar to represent indigent defendants as a public defender; Jay Nixon is a member of the Missouri bar. This move is the latest in a battle over the governor's <a href="http://www.missourinet.com/2016/07/14/missouri-public-defender-commission-sues-nixon-for-holding-budget-funds/">big cuts to the public defender department</a>: $3.5 million cut from a $4.5 million budget, leaving the public defender system unable to provide anything other than brief, cursory counsel, which may not meet the requirements of the law. tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.161399Wed, 03 Aug 2016 15:19:55 -0800Mo NickelsThe Entrepreneurial Statehttp://www.metafilter.com/161126/The%2DEntrepreneurial%2DState
<a href="https://evonomics.com/author/mariana/">Mariana Mazzucato</a> is <a href="http://marianamazzucato.com/rethinking-capitalism/">Rethinking Capitalism</a> (<a href="http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/50/11191209/1119120950.pdf">pdf</a>; <a href="https://twitter.com/MazzucatoM/status/756123804393476098">via</a>) <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f4109fae-40df-11e5-b98b-87c7270955cf.html">Lunch with the FT</a>: <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/lunch-with-mariana-mazzucato.html">Mariana Mazzucato</a> - "The first time I saw Mariana Mazzucato in action was when she intellectually eviscerated a guileless American venture capitalist..."[<a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/08/inverting-the-rhetoric-of-inequality.html">1</a>,<a href="http://video.ft.com/3656737291001/Robots-are-still-in-our-control/Markets">2</a>,<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntnSGVkR350&index=7&list=PLO6V5XgmEtcIdjI7EYEOd7yYrKCZr8LB7">3</a>; <a href="http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Entrepreneurial_State_-_web.pdf">pdf</a>]
also btw...
-<a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/06/managerialism-vs-innovation.html">Managerialism vs innovation</a>
-<a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/09/nib-good-economics-bad-politics.html">NIB: good economics, bad politics</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/32ba9b92-efd4-11e2-a237-00144feabdc0.html">A much-maligned engine of innovation</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/06/29/2133106/putting-the-new-deal-into-climate-rd/">Putting the 'New Deal' into climate R&amp;D</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/07/18/1901312/mission-finance-starting-to-think-big-again/">Mission Finance: starting to think big again</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/738da524-08f2-11e3-8b32-00144feabdc0.html">Why innovation needs the help of an active state</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f017a3c4-4e1b-11e3-8fa5-00144feabdc0.html">Serious innovation requires serious state support</a>
-<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOkjgCn1IDA">Mariana Mazzucato at FT Camp Alphaville Robot Panel</a> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.161126Fri, 22 Jul 2016 07:22:43 -0800kliulessThe open hand and the closed fisthttp://www.metafilter.com/160926/The%2Dopen%2Dhand%2Dand%2Dthe%2Dclosed%2Dfist
<a href="https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/just-print-money-and-give-it-to-everyone-please-b6bffc1f3ea5">Just print money and give it to everyone</a> by <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/113044/If-I-had-all-the-money-in-the-world-I-would-own-all-the-crack-in-the-world">Chris Arnade</a>: "The usual answer to why we don't do this is that it isn't politically feasible and there is no precedent. 1) That has never stopped bank bailouts, which often require a great deal of political and regulatory ingenuity to jam through. (<a href="https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/tarp-a-love-story-in-43-tweets-244e6fb9126c">TARP cough TARP</a>) 2) It is a symptom of a system built by and for the bankers to benefit themselves. It is the equivalent of saying, 'We can't do it because we have never wanted to do it'. That we don't do it this way isn't just a small economic quibble with no impact. The most visceral anger I hear from voters across the country is directed at bank bailouts, which they see as evidence of a rigged system. They are right. The system is rigged in the sense that our primary method to stimulate the economy also conveniently bails out bankers." (<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/160241/McDonalds-its-the-glue-that-holds-communities-together">previously</a>; <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/750483982354120704">via</a>) cf. more on helicopter money (or <a href="https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2016/05/ben-bernanke-and-democratic-helicopter.html">money financed fiscal expenditures</a>)
<ul><li><a href="http://www.abqjournal.com/791892/helicopter-money-can-help-economy.html">'Helicopter money' can help economy</a> - "There are many factors that can increase a country's potential economy – better education and health, more capital investment, streamlining regulations or fixing the tax code. But there is only one way to ensure a country fully utilizes its potential economy – ensuring enough spending in the economy to put all its people and resources to work."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.philosophyofmoney.net/helicopter-money-is-different/">Helicopter money is different</a> - "There is scope for policy innovation, contingency planning, and better policies for the long run. As it stands, granting central banks the power to make money-financed transfers to the private sector – as close as possible an approximation to Friedman's helicopter drop – seems the <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/social-credit-and-neutral-monetary-policies-a-rant-on-helicopter-money-and-monetary-neutrality.html">best on offer</a>."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/must-read-storify-the-puzzling-aversion-to-expansionary-fiscal-policyhttpsstorifycomdelongthe-aversion-to-expa.html">The Puzzling Aversion to Expansionary Fiscal Policy</a> - "Why now are <a href="http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2016_Summer_Andrews.php">elites</a> so into helicopter drops and basic income checks? What changed?"</li></ul>
viz. what helicopter drops can look like in practice
<ul><li><a href="http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-fedwire-recession.html">The Fedwire recession: Fedwire vs NGDP growth</a> - "We should be interested in this data because <a href="https://twitter.com/dandolfa/status/743305088345612288">Fedwire</a> is the U.S.'s most important <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/07/11/2168896/when-tech-companies-become-more-powerful-than-governments/">financial utility</a>. Operated by the Federal Reserve, Fedwire <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/07/10/wall-street-blockchain-technology-banking/">processes payments</a> between the nation's commercial banks using central banks money, or reserves, as the settlement medium. It accounts for a significant chunk of U.S. spending, or aggregate demand."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/stealth-china-stimulus-means-fiscal-gap-over-10-economists-say">Stealth China Stimulus Means Fiscal Gap Over 10%</a> - "China is <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/06/02/2164374/camp-alphaville-homework-pettis-edition/">stepping up stimulus by stealth</a> in its efforts to ensure hitting the leadership's growth target this year, with moves that will <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-11/government-holds-the-promise-of-faster-growth">enhance the role of the state</a> even as policy makers say they want a <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/06/arthur-kroeber-gavekal-on-chinese.html">bigger role for the market</a>."</li></ul>
also btw, further angles on why printing money and various ways of giving it away should be used to help 'flush' the system...
<ul><li><a href="http://www.regblog.org/2016/06/13/furman-productivity-inequality-and-economic-rents/">Productivity, Inequality, and Economic Rents</a> - "The good news is that to the degree that the 'rents' interpretation is correct, it suggests that it is possible to <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/must-read-barry-eichengreen-inequalityhttpswwwbisorgeventsconf160624eichengreen_presentationpdf.html">reduce inequality</a> and <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/claudia-goldin-and-larry-katz-the-race-between-education-and-technology-the-economic-history-research-frontier-a-great-rec.html">promote productivity growth</a> without hurting efficiency by changing how rents are divided—or even that it is possible to do both while <i>increasing</i> efficiency by acting to reduce rents in the economy. Policies that raise the minimum wage and provide greater support for collective bargaining can help level the playing field for workers in negotiations with employers, in turn changing the way that rents are divided. Measures that would rationalize licensing requirements for employment, reduce zoning and other land-use restrictions, appropriately balance intellectual property regimes, and change the incentives that have led to the expansion of the financial sector as a share of the economy would all help curb excessive rents... The bad news, however, is that rents have beneficiaries and these beneficiaries fight hard to keep and expand their rents. As a result, political reforms and other steps aimed at curbing the influence of regulatory lobbying are important for reducing the ability of people and corporations to seek rents successfully. Such actions would help ensure that economic growth in the decades ahead is robust, sustainable, and widely shared."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nature.com.edgesuite.net/nature/journal/v534/n7608/full/534472a.html">Economics: GDP in the dock</a> - "Since its invention during the Second World War as a thermometer of economic health, gross domestic product (GDP) has become a familiar incantation in claims and counter-claims about the well-being of nations. Some environmentalists and feminists were early critics, but until recent decades, few others questioned it. Now, campaigners ranging from left-wing Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz to the free-market <i><a href="http://www.metafilter.com/159439/Redefining-Wealth-and-Prosperity-in-the-21st-Century">Economist</a></i> magazine want to replace GDP with direct measurement of human well-being. <a href="https://twitter.com/GregDjerejian/status/745834481450422276">The technology industry</a> has joined them, bemoaning the failure of GDP to account properly for <a href="http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/measuring-gdp-in-a-digitalised-economy_5jlwqd81d09r-en">digital technologies</a>, including free online services, because the relevant statistics are not collected or do not fit easily into existing categories. There is even a mini-boom in books about economic statistics. A decisive coalition is shaping up in favour of moving away from GDP. The question is what to use instead."</li>
<li><a href="https://storify.com/delong/gordon-and-varian-approaches-to-understanding-the-">Gordon and Varian Approaches to Understanding the Ill-Named 'Secular Stagnation'</a> - "The scalability of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good">non rival &amp; non excludable</a> digital goods is changing the world's economy in ways that are not yet fully understood."</li>
<li><a href="http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2016/06/capitalism-20.html">Capitalism 2.0?</a> - "What kinds of institutional changes might we imagine for our current political economy that do a <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/751681600140738560">better job</a> of satisfying the demands of justice and human wellbeing... if we want <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/708024737683742720">a genuinely fair and progressive society</a> in the 21st century? ... What kinds of political and economic institutions would <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/23/bernie-sanders-heres-what-we-want/">serve to advance</a> these social goals? One approach that is gaining international attention is the idea of a universal basic income for all citizens... Another approach results from politically effective demands for <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-23/don-t-give-up-on-goal-of-equality-of-opportunity">real equality of opportunity</a>. Equality of opportunity requires <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/06/23/480969382/chaos-change-and-no-change-at-all-3-stories-of-school-money">high-quality public education</a> for <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2016/07/06/why-clintons-new-tuition-free-higher-ed-plan-matters/">everyone</a>... Another determinant of equality of opportunity is <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/clinton-public-option_us_5781064fe4b01edea78e1cf1">universal access</a> to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-joins-call-for-public-option-health-care-plan_us_577ec4cfe4b0c590f7e8a898">quality healthcare</a>."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/president-obama-support-basic-income-2016-6/">President Barack Obama on Basic Income</a> - "The way I describe it is that, <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/httpswwwwhitehousegovsitesdefaultfilespagefiles20160707_cea_ai_furmanpdf-is-this-time-different-the-o.html">because of automation</a>, because of globalization, we're going to have to examine the social compact, the same way we did early in the 19th century and then again during and after the Great Depression. The notion of a 40-hour workweek, a minimum wage, child labor laws, etc.—those will have to be updated for these new realities. But if we're smart right now, then we <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hill-social-security-expansion-20160711-snap-story.html">build ourselves a runway</a> to make that transition less abrupt."</li></ul>
bringing the scope out a bit on how we got to this point and a warning...
<a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/anti-globalization-backlash-from-right-by-dani-rodrik-2016-07">The Abdication of the Left</a> (<a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/07/links-for-07-12-16.html">via</a>)
<blockquote>A greater weakness of the left [is] the absence of a clear program to refashion capitalism and globalization for the twenty-first century... The left has failed to come up with ideas that are economically sound and politically popular, beyond ameliorative policies such as income transfers. Economists and technocrats on the left bear a large part of the blame. Instead of contributing to such a program, they abdicated too easily to market fundamentalism and bought in to its central tenets.
Worse still, [economists and technocrats on the left] led the hyper-globalization movement at crucial junctures. The enthroning of free capital mobility—especially of the <a href="http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/the-potential-costs-of-short-termism-to-u-s-economic-growth/">short-term</a> kind—as a policy norm by the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the IMF was arguably the most fateful decision for the global economy in recent decades.
[T]he right thrives on deepening divisions in society – "us" versus "them" – while the left, when successful, overcomes these cleavages through reforms that bridge them. Hence the paradox that earlier waves of reforms from the left – Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state – both saved capitalism from itself and effectively rendered themselves superfluous. Absent such a response again, the field will be <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-economic-roots-of-populism-in.html">left wide open for populists</a> and far-right groups, who will lead the world – as they always have – to deeper division and more frequent conflict.</blockquote>
lastly, an apology (after a <a href="https://pseudoerasmus.com/economic-history-books/">detour through some economic history</a>...)
<a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/a-plea-for-some-sympathy-for-repentant-left-neoliberals.html">A Plea for Some Sympathy for Repentant Left Neoliberals</a> - "We misjudged the proper balance between state and market, between command-and-control and market-incentive roads to social democratic ends... And here I whimper. Financial globalization was intended to take down barriers to capital inflows erected by rent-seekers in developing countries, and so speed growth in economies that had been starved of capital while also equalizing incomes. Financial deregulation was supposed to break up the cozy investment banking and other oligarchies of Wall Street and diminish their private-sector tax on the American economy. Financial deregulation was supposed to provide the poorer half of America with the access to fairly priced credit that it lacked and with the opportunity to invest in assets that would yield equity-class returns, which it also lacked. And, in a world in which central banks had the powers and the will to successfully stabilize aggregate demand, there seemed little downside... It all did go horribly wrong." tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.160926Tue, 12 Jul 2016 12:21:01 -0800kliulessTrekonomicshttp://www.metafilter.com/160483/Trekonomics
<a href="http://www.wired.com/2016/05/geeks-guide-star-trek-economics/">The Economic Lessons of Star Trek's Money-Free Society</a> - "[<a href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/05/31/the-big-idea-manu-saadia/">Manu Saadia</a>] points to technologies like GPS and the internet as models for how we can set ourselves on the path to a Star Trek future. 'If we decide as a society to make more of these crucial things available to all as public goods, we're probably going to be well on our way to improving the condition of everybody on Earth', he says. But he also warns that technology alone won't create a post-scarcity future... 'This is something that has to be dealt with on a political level, and we have to face that.' " (<a href="http://equitablegrowth.org/must-read-wired/">via</a>) <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/07/07/what-the-economics-of-star-trek-can-teach-us-about-the-real-world/">What the economics of Star Trek can teach us about the real world</a> - "Instead of working to become more wealthy, you work to increase your reputation. You work to increase your prestige." [<a href="https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab88d50">The Economics of Star Trek: The Proto-Post Scarcity Economy</a>]
<a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/manu-saadias-trekonomics-is-out.html">Forward by J. Bradford DeLong</a>: "Over the past century Star Trek has woven itself into our socio-cultural DNA. It provides a set of cultural reference points to powerful ideas, striking ideas, beneficial ideas that help us here in our civilization think better--even those of us who are economists... our fictions are, collectively, the dream-work of the reasoning by the organism that is the anthology intelligence that is humanity." [<a href="https://fold.cm/read/delong/notes-on-trekonomics-tKdx6Njn">Notes on Trekonomics</a>]
<blockquote><a href="http://boingboing.net/2016/06/07/roddenberrys-star-trek-was.html">Gene Roddenberry</a> mostly wanted to find a way to get people to pay him to make up stories, so that we wouldn't have to take a job that required a lot of heavy lifting. But he also wanted to tell particular stories. The stories he wanted to tell were those that would be the dreamwork for a better future:
<ul><li>He wanted to tell stories of a progressive humanity.</li>
<li>He wanted to tell stories about people in a better future in which <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-26/finding-better-ideas-to-rebuild-america">governmental institutions were smart</a> enough to stay out of Vietnam and people weren't obsessed with leaky roofs and food shortages.</li>
<li>He wanted to tell stories in which racial prejudice was as silly and stupid as it, in fact, is.</li>
<li>He wanted to tell stories in which it would be normal for a woman to be if not #1 at least #2 as first officer of a starship.</li>
<li>He wanted to tell stories in which everyone--even the Red Shirts--was an officer, a trained and well-educated professional treated with dignity and respect by their peers and superiors.</li></ul>
And Gene Roddenberry's successors as showrunners, writers, actors, set designers, and all the rest took on the same project: do the dreamwork of a better future.</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/06/weekend-reading-manu-saadia-introduction-trekonomics.html">Introduction</a>: "Star Trek presented my terrified eight-year old self with the mind-blowing idea that in the future things would get better... To this day, the greatest sense of wonder I experience from Star Trek comes not from the starships and the stars, new life and new civilizations, but from its depiction of an uncompromisingly humanist, galaxy-spanning utopian society. Which means that one huge question has haunted me since I was a boy. Is Star Trek possible? How likely is it to happen?"
<blockquote>The penultimate chapter is all about the greatest alien species in all of Trek - the odious and disgusting Ferengis, that is, us. The Ferengis are the capitalists and merchants of Star Trek's galaxy. Yet even them, the most hardened of profit-seeking species can change. All of Star Trek's third show, Deep Space 9, is in fact the story of how the Ferengis abjure their old traditions and become Keynesian social democrats.</blockquote>
<a href="http://econautodidactic.blogspot.com/2016/06/post-scarcity-thinking-manu-saadias.html">Post-Scarcity Thinking: Manu Saadia's 'Trekonomics'</a> - "There is no one leap from widespread want to universal abundance. It is a linear process, and importantly it is about distribution of resources more than it is about the absolute availability of resources. What the world of Trekonomics offers us is a blueprint of something to work towards as something concrete. There are enough theories and ideologies that exist critiquing the current order – perhaps the point is not to critique, but to change things. I would say that this book could help start a conversation about how we get from here to there."
Make it so? Getting 'there'...
<ul><li><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/why-dont-we-have-universal-basic-income">Money for All</a> - "<a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10860830/y-combinator-basic-income">Experiments</a> with guaranteed income have shown resoundingly positive results. All that's stopping us is politics." (<a href="http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/james-surowiecke-on-the-universal-basic-income/">A few thoughts</a>: "A UBI would allow the recipients to decide on their own priorities. It thus lacks the base of support that the other programs have.")<sup>1</sup></li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/3/2b6f1ca6-2bfd-11e6-bf8d-26294ad519fc.html">Free Lunch: An affordable utopia</a> - "Cost is not an <a href="https://twitter.com/arindube/status/738393234070773761">argument</a> against universal basic income... The share of the government's tax take and redistributive spending in the economy does not include tax exemptions and allowances, where the state selectively refrains from imposing normal taxes. If such 'tax expenditures' — a technical term for the money not raised — were included in tax revenue and spending, all rich countries would look like they had <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/06/daily-chart-1">much bigger states</a> already."<sup>2</sup></li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PW_XdapaOMYJ:www.economist.com/news/briefing/21699910-arguments-state-stipend-payable-all-citizens-are-being-heard-more-widely-sighing">Arguments for a state stipend payable to all citizens are being heard more widely</a> - "A <a href="https://twitter.com/mileskimball/status/744290198591311878">land tax</a> has the advantage of being progressive. Unlike taxes on income, <a href="http://qz.com/169767/the-century-old-solution-to-end-san-franciscos-class-warfare/">land taxes</a> do nothing to encourage apathy or avoidance; rather, they provide an incentive to owners to get the most out of their property. And they can also be lucrative. The sum value of all land in America, according to one recent estimate, is about $23 trillion, or 1.6 times GDP. A <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/29/nothing-like-this-has-ever-happened-before/">land-value tax</a> of 5% would raise a little over $1 trillion, which works out at about $3,500 for every American, or $8,500 for every American household. Thomas Paine would have relished such a prospect. His case for a basic income justified it as a quid pro quo for the existence of private property."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11827024/universal-basic-income">A universal basic income could absolutely solve poverty</a> - "There is no doubt that this is a lot of money. It amounts to approximately 16.7 percent of GDP, which would obviously be a huge increase in the size of the federal budget. At the same time, while this would take federal spending to a level never before seen, it wouldn't bring total US government spending to levels that are internationally unprecedented. Instead, it'd put us about where France and the Scandinavian social democracies are. Would that be a hard sell politically? Almost certainly. But on the other hand, you would <i><a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/742999367242665984">end poverty entirely</a></i>, which would be kind of a big deal." #<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/endPoverty">EndPoverty</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11827024/universal-basic-income">A universal basic income only makes sense if Americans change how they think about work</a> - "A UBI is the kind of radical policy that asks whether we actually need to live in this world, or whether there are better worlds on offer, if only we have the political and cultural courage to find them. Does work — as currently conceived — have to be our primary source of status? Should it organize our lives? And can those dynamics be changed by a check?"</li>
<li><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american-1464969586">A Guaranteed Income for Every American</a> - "Replacing the welfare state with an annual grant is the best way to cope with a radically changing U.S. jobs market—and to revitalize America's civic culture."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/05/bad-arguments-against-a-universal-basic-income">Bad arguments against a universal basic income</a> - "If work gives people forms of satisfaction that go beyond money, why is giving people money so likely to reduce them to lazy idlers on the dole?"</li>
<li><a href="http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/01/16-reasons-matt-yglesias-wrong-job-guarantee-vs-basic-income.html">16 Reasons Matt Yglesias is Wrong about the Job Guarantee vs. Basic Income</a> - "Yes, sending a check to people is not as 'messy', but let's stop pretending that it's a panacea for the fundamental problem of economic insecurity."<sup>3</sup></li></ul>
<a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/highlighted-for-march-23-2016.html">Populist Backlash and Political Economy</a> - "I find it alarming that here we are, more than one a half decades into the twenty-first century, and the wisdom and <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2015/05/12/the-free-development-of-each-is-the-condition-of-the-war-of-all-against-all-some-paths-to-the-true-knowledge/">true knowledge</a> that is state-of-the-art as far as political economy is concerned is still to be found in the writings of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi... Keynes taught that rich, free, capitalist societies could not survive without full employment--without giving everyone a useful, dignified, and prosperous economic role in society."
<blockquote>Polanyi's teaching was... that there were three things, land, labor, <a href="https://twitter.com/financequant/status/744325828620713984">and finance</a>, that should not be turned into "commodities" and thus subjected to allocation by the laws of the self-regulating market economy. And, Polanyi argued, if they were turned into "commodities" and thus subjected to allocation by the laws of the self-regulating market economy, the result would be disastrous...
For both Keynes and Polanyi, social insurance in the form of progressive taxes, a universal basic income, and government provision of public goods plus private necessities would help, but that would not be enough to do the job. Also essential are: first, useful employment and the resulting honorable and dignified role in society; second, justice in the sense that playing by the rules of the economic game calls forth the expected rewards; and, third, communal stability in the sense that should people's lives be transformed in place, community, and occupation it is by being pulled out of old ruts by brilliant opportunities locating in other places, living in other communities, and practicing other occupations--not being pushed out by regional or sectoral economic collapse, or perhaps by having one's community transformed too rapidly around one.</blockquote>
<a href="https://evonomics.com/the-deep-and-profound-changes-in-economics-thinking/">How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant</a> - "For almost 200 years the politics of the west, and more recently of much of the world, have been conducted in a framework of right versus left – of markets versus states, and of individual rights versus collective responsibilities. New <a href="https://evonomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Screen-Shot-2016-05-26-at-11.56.54-PM-768x598.png">economic thinking</a> scrambles, breaks up and re-forms these old dividing lines and debates... It isn't merely a matter of centrist compromise, of just splitting the difference."
<a href="https://worldaftercapital.gitbooks.io/worldaftercapital/content/part-two/Power.html">The Power of Knowledge</a> - "If the <a href="http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/10/cesar_hidalgo_o.html">knowledge loop</a> combined with digital technologies is so powerful, why do we need to work at becoming a knowledge society? Why not just keep government out of the way and let entrepreneurs and markets take care of everything from here on out? Because we are living with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g">older structures</a> that are the legacy of over a century of industrial society."
<blockquote>We have based our economies around the Job Loop, which is currently breaking down. We have based our laws about information access on locking up information and selling it like industrial products. And we have developed a culture that supports our participation in the industrial economy, both as producers (workers) and consumers. Both collectively and individually, we have adopted a range of assumptions and beliefs that enable us to <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/160376/The-Privilege-of-Longer-Working-Hours">structure our lives around our jobs</a> and to fuel the economy through consumption. To participate fully in a knowledge society, we will have to <a href="http://csen.tumblr.com/post/144102896829/the-post-recession-world-doesnt-scale">free ourselves</a> psychologically, re-thinking our behavior as consumers and embracing new assumptions and beliefs that enable us to learn, create, and share knowledge.
If we want to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=675G3_z7v-E">truly unleash</a> the knowledge loop, if we want to make it central to our lives, if we want to reap its benefits and limit its downsides, then we need to make major changes [in] regulation and self-regulation. These are the subject of <a href="https://worldaftercapital.gitbooks.io/worldaftercapital/content/part-three/index.html">Part Three</a>.</blockquote>
also btw...
-<a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-em/">The Age Of Em</a> [<a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/neerav-kingsland-on-the-new-robin-hanson-book.html">1</a>,<a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2016/06/19/the-age-of-em-wont-happen/">2</a>,<a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/744668500174635008">3</a>,<a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/744685629615669249">4</a>,<a href="https://twitter.com/janexwang/status/701935789727465472">5</a>]
-<a href="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:9d2fbe15d954">The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy</a>
-<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1250075807/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/">The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century</a> - "None of us has ever lived through a genuine industrial revolution. Until now. Digital technology is transforming every corner of the economy, fundamentally altering the way things are done, who does them, and what they earn for their efforts... can the modern world manage technological changes every bit as disruptive as those that shook the socioeconomic landscape of the 19th century?"
<blockquote>Past revolutions required rewriting the social contract: this one is unlikely to demand anything less. Avent looks to the history of the Industrial Revolution and the work of numerous experts for lessons in reordering society. The future needn't be bleak, but as <i>The Wealth of Humans</i> explains, we can't expect to restructure the world without a wrenching rethinking of what an economy should be.</blockquote>
---
<sup>1</sup><small>take a walk on the supply side...</small>
<ul><small><li><a href="http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2016/06/national-accounts-as-metaphor/">National accounts as metaphor</a> - "The fact is that the real accounts do not balance, only money accounts do. I think this point is insufficiently appreciated. [W]hat we call 'real' magnitudes are not completely real; only the money magnitudes are real. The 'real' ones are hypothetical."<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/152714/Basic-Income-How-to-Fix-a-Broken-Monetary-Transmission-Mechanism">*</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-07/supermodels-and-other-productivity-measures">Supermodels And Other Productivity Measures</a> - "One of the livelier debates in economics at the moment relates to the intersection of productivity growth and the role of technology in modern society. At its core, the problem is a simple one: for all the smartphones, Internet access, apps and other technological advancements of the last decade, productivity growth is close to zero."</li>
<li><a href="https://growthecon.com/blog/Baumol/">Is productivity the victim of it's own success?</a> - "Services have a built-in limit on their productivity growth, because we cannot innovate and get 'more time' in the way we can innovate and get 'more stuff' with goods. With services and goods being complements, this means <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/741017917580398592">overall productivity growth is restricted</a> to the pace of service quality growth, and hence is slowing down. This would be true even if we measured productivity perfectly; if we could actually measure utility per hour."</li>
<li><a href="http://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-reconcile-peak-profit-margins.html">Do digital industries break capitalism? How to Reconcile Peak Profit Margins And The Race To The Bottom</a> - "The view ties in with <a href="http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2016/02/article_0001.html">Jaron Lanier's thesis</a> about how businesses based on digital network effects tend to encourage monopolism and a winner-takes-all framework. This inevitably erodes the freedoms and wealth of the middle and cultural classes by undermining the very protections (what might also be called culturally-favoured inefficiencies) that had hitherto guarded their capacity to earn a consumer surplus. In the long run, a <a href="https://twitter.com/SeanMcElwee/status/744272943774052352">new</a> <a href="http://qz.com/248685/raghuram-rajan-explains-why-corrupt-politicians-win-elections-in-india/">type of</a> <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/06/07/2165277/how-too-big-to-fail-is-impeding-innovation/">feudalism</a> is brought about, wherein the average person's quality of life becomes entirely dictated by the whims and desires of digital tycoons."</li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/06/09/2165739/you-can-see-the-computer-age-everywhere-but-in-the-investment-statistics/">You can see the computer age everywhere but in the investment statistics</a> - "Failing to recognise that poor productivity is the result of low investment is very damaging, as it deflects attention from why investment is so low. The reason, as I explained in '<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/64b73a8e-0485-11e5-95ad-00144feabdc0.html">Executive pay holds the key to the productivity puzzle</a>' (FT, May 29 2015), is that the bonus culture rewards chief executives who keep investment down. We are not going to solve this problem until we recognise the low investment causes poor productivity and consider how to change the perverse incentives that cause low investment."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w22327">Management as a Technology?</a> - "Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain company and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles?"</li></small></ul>
<sup>2</sup><small>alternative financing?</small>
<ul><small><li><a href="http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2016/06/why-helicopter-money-is-a-free-lunch/">Why Helicopter Money is a 'Free Lunch'</a> - "Fiat money can then be used <i>at no cost</i> to the consolidated public sector balance sheet as a way to mobilize unemployed or underemployed real resources and to accelerate price and wage dynamics in heavily indebted economies suffering from large output gaps and price deflation. HM is a 'free lunch' in the simple sense that, if it works and succeeds in closing the output gap, people won't have to repay it through higher taxes or undesired (above optimal) inflation."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.philosophyofmoney.net/helicopter-drops-a-brief-reply-to-ben-bernanke/">Helicopter drops: A brief reply to Ben Bernanke</a> - "Ben <i>assumes</i> that helicopter drops are fiscal policy. He does so without clarifying the <a href="http://www.philosophyofmoney.net/the-distinction-between-monetary-and-fiscal-policy/">distinction</a> between fiscal and monetary policy, and then <a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/04/ben-bernanke-helicopter-money.html">quotes Friedman</a> who is very <a href="http://www.philosophyofmoney.net/reply-to-brad-part-ii-pigou-haberler-friedman-v-hicks-hansen-krugman/">clear</a> on the issue – and very clear that cash transfers financed with base money is monetary policy."</li>
<li><a href="http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2016/04/on-central-bank-lending-to-government.html">On Central Bank Lending to Government</a> - "If the government of Canada owns the Bank of Canada, which it does, then de facto direct or indirect Bank of Canada lending to the government of Canada, at an irrelevant rate of interest, is neither a Bad Thing nor a Good Thing. <i>It's inevitable</i>, if the Bank of Canada lends and the government borrows."</li></small></ul>
<sup>3</sup><small>on welfare reform...
-<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/the-end-of-welfare-as-we-know-it/476322/">The End of Welfare as We Know It</a>
-<a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/6/20/11789988/clintons-welfare-reform">"If the goal was to get rid of poverty, we failed": the legacy of the 1996 welfare reform</a>
-<a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9334215/equality-of-opportunity">The case against equality of opportunity</a>
-<a href="http://angrybearblog.com/2016/06/whats-so-great-about-equality-of-opportunity.html">What's so Great about Equality of Opportunity?</a>
-<a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4796.html">Mobility is no answer to dispersion</a>
-<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-23/don-t-give-up-on-goal-of-equality-of-opportunity">Don't Give Up on Equality of Opportunity</a></small> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.160483Tue, 21 Jun 2016 03:34:01 -0800kliulessSapiens 2.0: Homo Deus?http://www.metafilter.com/159860/Sapiens%2D20%2DHomo%2DDeus
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/20/silicon-assassins-condemn-humans-life-useless-artificial-intelligence">In his follow-up to <i>Sapiens</i>, Yuval Noah Harari envisions what a 'useless class' of humans might look like as AI advances and spreads</a> - "I'm aware that these kinds of forecasts have been around for at least 200 years, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they never came true so far. It's basically the boy who cried wolf, but in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time." <ul><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6BK5Q_Dblo">Yuval Harari: Techno-Religions and Silicon Prophets</a> - "Will the 21st century be shaped by hi-tech gurus or by religious zealots – or are they <a href="http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/12/Superhumanintelligence.shtml">the same</a> thing? What is the current status of religions and ideologies in the world, and what will be the likely impact of 21st-century <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/05/garwin-and-mike-shot.html">technological breakthroughs</a> on religion and ideology? Will traditional religions and ideologies—from Christianity and Islam to Liberalism and Socialism—manage to <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/05/evidence-for-very-recent-natural.html">survive</a> the technological and economic revolutions of the 21st century? What would be the place of Islam, for example, in a world of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence? The talk addresses these questions, and argues that the <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-future-of-machine-intelligence.html">future belongs</a> to techno-religions, which promise salvation through technology, and which are already <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/05/homo-sapiens-20-jamie-metzl-techcrunch.html">gathering believers</a> in places such as Silicon Valley."</li>
<li><a href="https://blog.foretellix.com/2016/05/10/the-next-20-years-of-automation/">Automation and unemployment are coming, but I guess we'll manage</a> - "Summary: This post takes a (speculative) look at the general implications of automation over the next 20 years: <a href="https://backchannel.com/the-man-who-built-googles-first-self-driving-car-is-now-a-trucker-aa1726d3a36f">Employment declines</a>. <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:59d3140d0f51">Democracy does <i>not</i> fold</a>. <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/you-cant-talk-about-robots-without-talking-about-basic-income">Universal Basic Income becomes common</a>. <a href="http://qz.com/689851/its-a-psychedelic-renaissance-as-scientists-identify-medicinal-qualities-of-hardcore-drugs/">Education improves</a>. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html">New-age stuff grows</a>. <a href="http://continuations.com/post/144345423040/basic-income-the-biggest-question-voting-for">Quality-of-life inequality grows or shrinks</a>, depending on how you look. And so on. A follow-up post will discuss the verification implications."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-10/get-ready-for-high-frequency-lawyers">Get Ready for High-Frequency Lawyers</a> - "In the future, we will almost certainly design computers to manage our economic interactions for us. Instead of teams of human lawyers drawing up fixed rules on sheets of paper, machines will talk to one another, exercising broad powers to renegotiate deals on the spot. At that point, Sannikov's <a href="https://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/yuliy-sannikov-and-the-continuous-time-approach-to-dynamic-contracting/">work will go</a> from esoteric math to reality."</li>
<li><a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjq4e_FivDMAhVP2mMKHTVRCisQFggdMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fchiefless-company-rakes-in-more-than-100-million-1463399393&usg=AFQjCNEV-ZZ9eItrSDYekayXZom1Mnie9g&sig2=3HEPLHdIfa5Ji7OS2XoePQ">Chiefless Company Rakes In More Than $100 Million</a> - "<a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2016/5/22/the-weekend-read-may-22">A group called DAO</a>, which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, is <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/central-counterparties-ccps-decentralised-blockchains-colin-platt">running itself</a> via computer code on a network. <a href="http://continuations.com/post/144154490480/loyalty-and-the-need-for-group-platforms-in">Every operating detail</a>, from governance to <a href="http://continuations.com/post/144449297305/announcing-blockstack-labs-a-name-change">day-to-day operations</a> to payment schedules, is <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/22/all-the-cool-kids-are-doing-ethereum-now/">laid out in the code</a> that runs the company. There are no incorporation papers, board of directors or CEO... it is fundraising on the Ethereum platform, <a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2016/5/15/the-weekend-read-may-15">an alternative version of bitcoin</a>. It plans to <a href="http://andolfatto.blogspot.com/2016/05/monetary-policy-implications-of.html">use the money</a> it raises to fund <a href="http://www.coindesk.com/fed-governor-lael-brainard-blockchain/">startups building applications</a> on Ethereum, and as of Saturday had <a href="http://qz.com/688194/the-price-of-ether-a-bitcoin-rival-is-soaring-because-of-a-radical-150-million-experiment/">raised more</a> than $107 million, according to the company's publicly viewable digital wallet on Ethereum."</li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/3/99cdeefc-1b77-11e6-b286-cddde55ca122.html">Where has all the productivity gone? Inequality may hold the key to stagnant growth despite innovation</a> - "The ability of sectoral productivity growth to <a href="http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/economists-hold-forth-on-ideas-to-boost-productivity-growth/">boost whole-economy productivity</a> growth depends on there being enough demand for the more productive sector's product for it to keep resources employed. And if rising inequality limits the demand for new products from a large part of the population, the result may instead be that the more productive sectors shrink as soon as the <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/recent-product-innovations-favor-the-wealthy.html">demand from only the richest</a> consumers has been satisfied... average full-time employees in the US still work about 47 hours a week, <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx">according to Gallup</a>. Here's to hoping that if the robots ever do take over, they help us realise <a href="http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/upload/Intro_Session1.pdf">Keynes's vision</a> for his generation's grandchildren."</li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8205ccc0-1ead-11e6-b286-cddde55ca122.html">Inequality and the monopolies of unfettered techno markets</a> - "In testimony to the US Federal Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/rockefellers-tarbell/">Ida Tarbell</a>, a journalist known for exposing the Standard Oil monopoly of John D Rockefeller and <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-woman-who-took-on-the-tycoon-651396/">championing the antitrust movement</a> of the era, made a <a href="https://twitter.com/agantarajuanda/status/733948321757339648">simple but profound</a> point about the <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders">structure of the unconstrained American marketplace</a>. It was the <a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2016/05/bad-arguments-against-marxism.html">policy of business trusts</a>, she said, to keep supply always a little less than demand to the great detriment of society. A congressman then took the stand to argue that an employer's relationship with his employees had 'turned into a <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/must-read-thomas-philippon-finance-vs-wal-mart-why-are-financial-services-so-expensive-in-rethinking-the-fina.html">feudalism</a> grosser than English history had ever shown'. Tarbell favoured what was then being popularised as the '<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkCABjFT32A#t=21m34s">scientific</a>' approach, which <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eb2e8838-1ea1-11e6-b286-cddde55ca122.html">elevated</a> the <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/156358/How-the-Federal-Reserve-promotes-income-inequality">role</a> of <a href="http://prospect.org/article/republic-central-banker">central planners</a> in an organisation to the <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/monetary-policy-201.html">supposed benefit</a> of all concerned. Ironically, many decades later, John Kenneth Galbraith would argue that the <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/social-credit-and-neutral-monetary-policies-a-rant-on-helicopter-money-and-monetary-neutrality.html">dependency</a> on a thick layer of <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/american-machiavelli/">managerial planners</a> had rendered antitrust measures ineffective at arresting the development and burgeoning power of what he described as the '<a href="http://continuations.com/post/144602272050/contestable-markets-in-the-age-of-network-effects">technostructure</a>'. The company, he insisted, had become an uncompetitive monstrosity."</li>
<li><a href="http://continuations.com/post/144500376860/the-dangerous-rise-of-populism">The Dangerous Rise of Populism</a> - "We are living in a dangerous time of transition: <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2016/05/09/why-is-the-finance-sector-so-profitable/">industrial capitalism</a> is <a href="https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/finance/why-people-are-angry/">breaking down</a> and we don't yet have a <a href="https://promarket.org/promarket-interview-bo-rothstein-on-the-role-of-government-in-market-economies/">viable alternative</a>. Incumbent politicians are <a href="http://www.eschatonblog.com/2016/05/incrementalism.html">still clinging</a> to fixing the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/sunday-review/sorry-we-dont-take-obamacare.html">existing system</a> while insurgent populists are arguing for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/16/most-americans-want-to-replace-obamacare-with-a-single-payer-system-including-a-lot-of-republicans/">big changes</a>. This to a large degree explains the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/business/international/in-sweden-an-experiment-turns-shorter-workdays-into-bigger-gains.html">scary rise</a> of populism we are seeing around the world and in the United States.</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.159860Tue, 24 May 2016 08:42:35 -0800kliulessRedefining Wealth and Prosperity in the 21st Centuryhttp://www.metafilter.com/159439/Redefining%2DWealth%2Dand%2DProsperity%2Din%2Dthe%2D21st%2DCentury
<a href="http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21697845-gross-domestic-product-gdp-increasingly-poor-measure-prosperity-it-not-even">Kennedy was right</a> - "Much that is valuable is neither tangible nor tradable... Gross domestic product (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7-G3PC_868#t=15m35s">GDP</a>) is increasingly a poor measure of prosperity. It is not even a reliable gauge of production."<a href="http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2012/01/robert-kennedy-on-shortcomings-of-gdp.html">*</a> <blockquote>When a first-year undergraduate first encounters the idea of GDP as the value added in an economy, adjusted for inflation, it sounds pretty straightforward, <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/measuring-gdp-in-digital-economy-by-charles-bean-2016-05">says Sir Charles Bean</a>, the author of a recent <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-economic-statistics-call-for-evidence/press-notice-charles-bean-kicks-off-review-to-future-proof-uk-statistics">review</a> of <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-uk-economic-statistics-final-report/press-notice-take-economic-statistics-back-to-the-future-says-charlie-bean">economic statistics</a> for the British government. Get into the details, though, and it is a highly complex construct—and, as Mr <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=site:j-bradford-delong.net+nordhaus">Nordhaus's fable</a> shows, a snare for the unwary...
By convention GDP measures only output that is bought and sold. There are reasons for this, only some of them sound. First, market transactions are taxable and therefore of interest to the exchequer, an important consumer of GDP statistics. Second, they can be influenced by <a href="http://andolfatto.blogspot.com/2016/04/kocherlakota-on-want-of-us-government.html">policies to manage aggregate demand</a>. Third, where there are market prices, it is fairly straightforward to put a value on output. This convention means that so-called "<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/158141/A-proper-reckoning">home production</a>", such as housework or caring for an elderly relative, is excluded from GDP, even though such unpaid services have considerable value.</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21697834-gdp-bad-gauge-material-well-being-time-fresh-approach-how-measure-prosperity">How to measure prosperity: GDP is a bad gauge of material well-being. Time for a fresh approach</a>
<blockquote>Although a <a href="https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/">big improvement</a> on today's measure, <a href="http://harvardkennedyschoolreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/beachyzorn2.jpg">GDP-plus</a> [<a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/content/download/67149/1241406/version/1/file/PAE+Beachy_Zorn_2012.pdf">pdf</a>; <a href="http://harvardkennedyschoolreview.com/counting-what-counts-gdp-redefined/">1</a>,<a href="https://hbr.org/2012/01/the-economics-of-well-being">2</a>,<a href="https://hbr.org/2014/03/forget-gdp-we-need-numbers-that-matter-for-the-questions-we-have/">3</a>] would still be an assessment of the flow of income. To provide a cross-check on a country's prosperity, a <a href="http://www.concertedaction.com/2015/10/07/united-states-net-wealth/">third gauge</a> would take stock, each decade, of its wealth. This balance-sheet would include government assets such as roads and parks as well as <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sXGSCSzbMsIJ:www.ft.com/cms/s/3/fe3af68e-0aef-11e6-9456-444ab5211a2f.html">private wealth</a>. Intangible capital—skills, brands, designs, scientific ideas and online networks—would all be valued. <a href="http://www.alt-m.org/2016/04/26/why-financial-regulators-are-warming-to-blockchains-and-rightfully-so/">The ledger</a> should also account for the depletion of capital: the wear-and-tear of machinery, the deterioration of roads and public spaces, <a href="http://grist.org/article/econ/">and damage to the environment</a>. Building these benchmarks will demand a revolution in national statistical agencies as bold as the one that created GDP in the first place.</blockquote>
Because what is not measured tends to be undervalued and ignored, conversely in a '<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-05/the-book-that-will-save-banking-from-itself">market</a>' economy, activities that result in dollar transactions at their <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/07/what-is-price-theory.html">associated prices</a> tend to be overly privileged. And yet it's the main <a href="http://andolfatto.blogspot.com/2016/05/why-blockchain-should-be-familiar-to-you.html">signaling mechanism</a> and <a href="http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money">incentive system</a> that we <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1975/presentation-speech.html">coordinate on</a> and organize our lives around. Hence, as a pervasive and decidedly <a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/06/2009-reith-lectures-markets-and-morals.html">non-neutral value system</a>, it is (literally) <a href="http://andolfatto.blogspot.com/2016/05/monetary-policy-implications-of.html">worth interrogating</a>; the proverbial missing keys to ongoing prosperity may well indeed lie beyond the cold glow of the streetlight. Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRrDsbUdY_k">blindly measuring</a> everything is <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fe50f19e-1113-11e6-91da-096d89bd2173.html">no solution</a> either, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law">or worse</a>. So a corollary is that <i>proper</i> measurement and <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/159341/WORLD-OF-TOMORROW">continual (re-)evaluation</a> is both hard and necessary to improve our well-being and <a href="http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2016/04/large-structures-and-social-change.html">our understanding</a> of <a href="http://continuations.com/post/142460281505/against-technological-determinism-blockchains-and">how to better organize society</a>.
also btw...
<ul><li><a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/weekend-reading-matt-bruenig-what-is-wealth.html">What Is Wealth?</a> - "Wealth assets are always and anywhere political and social constructs. Things exist, but '<a href="https://www.edge.org/conversation/what-is-value">wealth</a>' is a fiction, the contours of which are <a href="http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2016/04/a-21st-century-gold-standard.html">fully derivative</a> of <a href="http://evonomics.com/note-to-economists-saving-doesnt-create-savings/">how we create</a> our <a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/1357.html">systems of control and power</a> over the material things of the world."</li>
<li><a href="http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/31/capitalism-redefined/?page=all">What is Prosperity?</a> - "And therein lies the difference between a poor society and a prosperous one. It isn't the amount of money that a society has in circulation, whether dollars, euros, beads, or wampum. Rather, it is the availability of the things that create well-being—like antibiotics, air conditioning, safe food, the ability to travel, and even frivolous things like video games. It is the availability of these 'solutions' to human problems—things that make life better on a relative basis—that makes us prosperous. This is why prosperity in human societies can't be properly understood by just looking at monetary measures of income or wealth. Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems. These solutions run from the prosaic, like a crunchier potato chip, to the profound, like cures for deadly diseases. Ultimately, the measure of a society's wealth is the range of human problems that it has found a way to solve and how available it has made those solutions to its citizens."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/whose-are-the-ruling-macroeconomic-ideas.html">Whose Are the Ruling Macroeconomic Ideas?</a> - "When I look around, I see lots of <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-02/a-basic-income-should-be-the-next-big-thing">ideas with a potency that is extremely great</a> but with influence that is nowheresville. The ruling ideas are... barely ideas--they are, rather slogans. The bipartisan technocratic policy center of politicians who listen to arguments about what policies might actually work is gone--or at least paralyzed. And too many key levers of power are held by a right--<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7fcb38e8-15f5-11e6-9d98-00386a18e39d.html">in Germany</a>, in Britain, and in the U.S.--that appears profoundly uninterested in argument about <a href="http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2016/04/27/Rethinking-economics-Cohen-and-De-Long.aspx">policy effectiveness</a>, if not uninterested in <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:txWl0LpEgiYJ:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/05/10/2161194/podcast-brad-delong-on-hamiltonian-economics-and-us-economic-history/">policy effectiveness</a> itself."</li>
<ol><li><i>The bankers have us by the plums:</i> Thus it is important to cosset, coddle, and enrich our bankers, because only if they are confident will the engine of financial intermediation that is the only thing that can create a booming full-employment economy run smoothly.</li>
<li><i>Debt is bad (except when it is used to fund tax cuts for "job creators"):</i> Hence it is important to cut Social Security and make sure that not an extra drop is spent on public infrastructure.</li>
<li><i>Today's extremely low interest rates must be unnatural:</i> Hence they need to be reversed and monetary policy "normalized" as quickly as normalization can be accomplished without renewed recession.</li>
<li><i>Only pain can drive reform:</i> Hence boosting employment and restoring fast growth would be bad as it would impeded the essential process of actually undertaking the badly-needed "structural reforms".</li>
<li><i>We couldn't have done any better:</i> The most urgent economic problems of the North Atlantic aren't the standard ones of too-little "money" (of various kinds) chasing a normal amount of goods, but are complicated and irresolvable.</li></ol>
<li><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/stiglitz-inequality/479952/">A Conversation With Joseph Stiglitz</a> - "GDP is just the sum total of the output of the economy, it doesn't say how much of that is going into whose pocket. In the first three years of the recovery, 91 percent of all gains went to the top 1 percent. So the bottom 99 percent saw nothing. Many were actually becoming worse off: Their balance sheet had been destroyed, their major asset has been their home and the value of their home had gone down anywhere from 20 to 50 percent. Then came QE, and it created a stock-market but the average American has very little in the stock market. Overall ownership of stocks, is much more concentrated than the concentration of wealth itself, so QE was basically a gift to the 1 percent."</li>
<blockquote>Most of the models used by economists ignored inequality. They pretended that macroeconomy was unaffected by inequality. I think that was totally wrong. The strange thing about the economics profession over the last 35 year is that there has been two strands: One very strongly focusing on the limitations of the market, and then another saying how wonderful markets were. Unfortunately too much attention was being paid to that second strand.<br><br>What can we do about it? We've had this very strong strand that is focused on the limitations and market imperfections. A very large fraction of the younger people, this is what they want to work on. It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.</blockquote>
<li><a href="https://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/kristol-kalecki-and-a-19th-century-economist-defending-patriarchy-all-on-political-macroeconomics/">Kristol, Kalecki, and a 19th Century Economist Defending Patriarchy all on Political Macroeconomics</a> - "So if you are a type who believes the government can only do bad, who believes that prosperity flows from how appreciated the business community feels, and who believes strongly in the Natural Order, then you are not going to be in favor of activist monetary and fiscal policy to fix the economy. You also won't have any actual <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/pro-business-reforms-have-very-little-effect-economic-growth">coherent view of what is wrong</a> with the economy."</li>
<li><a href="http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/03/new-paradigms-in-economic-theory-not-so.html">New paradigms in economic theory?</a> - "There seem to be <a href="http://evonomics.com/traditional-economics-failed-heres-a-new-blueprint/">three mini-paradigms</a> here: bounded rationality, interdependence, and holistic analysis. The first two have already been making inroads in economics, though I think they should make more inroads. The latter is kind of an older idea that doesn't seem to have panned out as well as many hoped - there isn't actually going to be a Second Enlightenment replacing reductionist science with holism. But I think that more important than any of these theoretical changes - or the <a href="http://evonomics.com/economic-theory-is-dead-heres-what-will-replace-it/">evolutionary theory</a> suggested by Wilson - is the <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-06/how-economics-went-from-theory-to-data">empirical revolution in econ</a>. Ten million cool theories are of little use beyond the 'gee whiz' factor if you can't pick between them."</li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1KMxvSq-h5IJ:www.ft.com/cms/s/3/4b6ee16e-110c-11e6-91da-096d89bd2173.html">Free Lunch: ways to build a helicopter</a> - "An op-ed in the FT by Shahin Vallée makes the very important and under-appreciated point that there is a choice to be made about <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b6bb479e-0c86-11e6-b0f1-61f222853ff3.html">whom the helicopter drop should target</a>, and that how this choice is made matters for economic and political economy reasons. Vallée rightly distinguishes between three targets: the government, households and the banking system. We could, for completeness, <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/727852114257547264">add the non-financial private sector</a>, that is to say businesses producing goods and services in the 'real economy'... banks and businesses are already insufficiently willing to either lend or invest despite record low funding costs. The same is strangely true for governments. By far the <a href="http://mainlymacro.blogspot.in/2016/05/ben-bernanke-and-democratic-helicopter.html">biggest bang for the helicopter buck</a> can be expected from a money drop to households." [<a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/helicopter-money-fiscal-stimulus-by-j--bradford-delong-2016-04">1</a>,<a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/05/ben-bernanke-and-democratic-helicopter-money.html">2</a>,<a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/must-read-adair-turner-helicopters-on-a-leashhttpswwwproject-syndicateorgcommentaryhelicopter-money-political.html">3</a>,<a href="http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2016/05/helicopter-money-and-the-non-observance-of-two-counterfactual-conditionals.html">4</a>,<a href="http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2016/05/can-governments-offset-helicopter-money.html">5</a>]</li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3TL9vxVf654J:www.ft.com/cms/s/3/be295566-12d5-11e6-91da-096d89bd2173.html">Universal basic income continues to attract attention</a> - "The oldest argument for UBI (Thomas Paine's) is that it justly allocates economic rent to which no one has a fair individual claim, since it results from windfall natural resources or the overall productivity of society. Paine applied his argument to land ownership; it seems entirely plausible to <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/727880620467097601">apply the same argument</a> to some of the rents created by technological innovation and privatised intellectual property."</li>
<li><a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-income-welfare/">Nixon's Basic Income Plan</a> - "It was the summer of '68, the end of the decade that brought us flower power and Woodstock, rock and roll and Vietnam, Martin Luther King and a feminist revolution. It was a time when everything seemed possible, even a conservative president strengthening the welfare state. While young demonstrators the world over were taking to the streets, five famous economists — John Kenneth Galbraith, Harold Watts, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Lampman — wrote that '[t]he country will not have met its responsibility until everyone in the nation is assured an income no less than the officially recognized definition of poverty'. The <i>New York Times</i> published their letter, signed by 1,200 fellow economists, on the front page. The next year, Richard Nixon was on the verge of making these economists' dream a reality by enacting an <a href="http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/guaranteed-income%E2%80%99s-moment-sun">unconditional income for all</a> poor families."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21694493-technological-blueprint-better-government-domesday-20">Running India: Domesday 2.0</a> - "A technological blueprint for better government"</li>
<blockquote>IN A month or so, India will have registered a billion residents—the latest stage in the creation of a complete identity database of what will soon be the world's most populous country. Aadhaar, which means "foundation" in Hindi, matches names with fingerprints and iris scans on a scale that has never been seen before. Reimagining government with such technology at its core will be key to meeting the mounting aspirations of India's citizens, according to two of the scheme's architects, Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah. If the Domesday Book, an 11th-century survey of England, was commissioned to raise funds for government, Aadhaar's most useful purpose is to help their disbursement... It allows the government to pay benefits directly to over 200m bank accounts linked to its database, so cutting out layers of corrupt and inept middlemen.</blockquote>
<li><a href="https://artir.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/no-great-technological-stagnation/">No Great Technological Stagnation</a> - "<a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-28/is-technology-stagnating">Many economists say</a> we are living through a Great Stagnation. The term, was made famous by Tyler Cowen's<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation"> book of the same name</a> and the latest iteration is, of course, Robert Gordon's <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10544.html">The Rise and Fall of American Growth</a>. But they usually look at economic factors like Total Factor Productivity (TFP) or GDP per hour worked. By these measures, <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Interactives/2014/thinktank20/chapters/tt20-united-states-economic-growth-gordon.pdf?la=en">we are living through a stagnant period</a>. Some expected that the stagnation would go away once we properly accounted for the Internet and similar hard to account for innovations, but apparently <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/bpea/papers/2016/byrne-et-al-productivity-measurement">this was done</a>, and the picture doesn't change much. In this post, I take an engineering perspective and look directly at technology itself."</li>
<li><a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/05/technology-versus-the-distribution-of-workers-in-aggregate-productivity.html">Decomposition: Technology versus the Distribution of Workers in Aggregate Productivity</a> - "Gordon's critics could well be right about their individual technologies, and yet wrong about this having anything to do with aggregate growth, because those sectors may not employ many people. And Gordon can be right about aggregate growth, but wrong about individual technologies stagnating, because the movement of workers to low-productivity sectors may be dragging down growth. In short, you cannot talk about aggregate productivity growth without talking about both technology and the <a href="http://www.nber.org/digest/apr15/w20836.html">distribution of workers</a> across sectors."</li>
<li><a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/05/the-economic-disease-eating-away-at-the-us.html">The Productivity Slump and What to Do about It</a> - "How much productive talent is wasted simply because of lack of opportunity? How many women and minorities, for example, could be contributing greatly to our economy but never got the chance? Increasing opportunity so that talented individuals have the chance to reach their <a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/05/the-productivity-slump-and-what-to-do-about-it.html">full potential</a> would give the economy a needed efficiency boost. Education is one component of this, but we also need to be sure that the barriers that keep people from realizing their potential are removed... Productivity growth is the main driver of <a href="http://timothyblee.com/2016/05/07/some-thoughts-on-the-end-of-economic-growth/">economic growth</a> and a rising standard of living. By itself, an increase in productivity won't necessarily translate into rising living standards for everyone -- that depends on how the increase in output is divided among various groups in the economy. If all of the increase in output due to rising productivity goes to those at the top of the income distribution, as it has in recent decades, it won't do much for most people."</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.159439Wed, 11 May 2016 01:01:17 -0800kliulessIt was not a good time for Canadian citizenshttp://www.metafilter.com/159426/It%2Dwas%2Dnot%2Da%2Dgood%2Dtime%2Dfor%2DCanadian%2Dcitizens
<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/nine-years-of-censorship-1.19842">After nine years of censorship, Canadian scientists can speak about their work.</a> Although it may take time for the policy changes to make their way through the bureaucracy. <code>It could take years for Canadian scientists to recover from heavy funding cuts, low morale and tight control over communication. Looking back over what happened, Macdonald remembers something his grandmother once told him. "It takes ten years to make a good garden, but you can wreck it in six months," he says. "It's like that with science."</code>
<a href="https://www.metafilter.com/145065/Canadian-government-continues-valiant-fight-in-the-war-against-science">Previously</a> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.159426Tue, 10 May 2016 13:49:21 -0800ursus_comiterWORLD OF TOMORROWhttp://www.metafilter.com/159341/WORLD%2DOF%2DTOMORROW
<a href="http://worldaftercapital.org/">World After Capital</a> by <a href="http://continuations.com/post/142624625195/my-book-world-after-capital-rough-draft">Albert Wenger</a> [<a href="https://worldaftercapital.gitbooks.io/worldaftercapital/content/">Work in Progress</a>; <a href="https://github.com/WorldAfterCapital/WorldAfterCapital">GitHub</a>; <a href="https://www.gitbook.com/book/worldaftercapital/worldaftercapital/details">GitBook</a>; <a href="https://www.gitbook.com/download/pdf/book/worldaftercapital/worldaftercapital">PDF</a>; <a href="http://worldaftercapital.org/faq/">FAQ</a>] - "Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting from capital to attention. <i><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q--KXVvxPM9NNUdJwi_szRhuA8oeg1ciaggFC7qKBuc/edit">World After Capital</a></i> suggests ways to expand economic, informational and psychological freedom to go from an industrial to a knowledge society." (<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/tags/AlbertWenger">previously</a>) tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.159341Sat, 07 May 2016 14:36:45 -0800kliulessA fine dayhttp://www.metafilter.com/158238/A%2Dfine%2Dday
The New York Public Library has digitized the diary of one <a href="http://archives.nypl.org/mss/318">Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker</a> as part of their <a href="http://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/02/08/bleecker-diary-today">Early American Manuscripts Project</a>. Bleecker wrote about her life in New York City for <a href="http://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/14/dehardt-bleecker-diary">seven</a> years, beginning in 1799 when she was eighteen years old and ending in 1806. tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.158238Tue, 29 Mar 2016 12:58:49 -0800roomthreeseventeensources of obligation, sources of valuehttp://www.metafilter.com/157955/sources%2Dof%2Dobligation%2Dsources%2Dof%2Dvalue
<a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2016/03/ethereumsv-fiat-money-to-share.pdf">an introduction to fiat money</a> (pdf) by <a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/">Steve Randy Waldman</a>:<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/search.mefi?site=mefi&q=Adelle+Waldman" title="(Adelle's brother ;)">*</a> - "Self-reinforcing <a href="http://bactra.org/notebooks/network-data-analysis.html">bootstrap dynamics</a> hold as strongly for a <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/142904/The-Social-Construction-of-Money-Wealth-Capital-in-the-21st-Century#5770622" title="[ed.note: _the spider's war_ is out! (the last book of daniel abraham's 'dagger and coin' series, featuring cithrin bel sarcour as the alexander hamilton of northcoast ;)]">king's token</a> as it would for any other thing, but much more stably so, since the king can <a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/01/who-first-said-the-us-is-an-insurance-company-with-an-army.html">reinforce and assure</a> the stability of his token so long as he retains the <a href="http://www.democracyjournal.org/30/capitalism-redefined.php?page=all">political capacity</a> to coerce or persuade <a href="https://twitter.com/HPublius/status/688248211505414146">payment of tax</a>." (<a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/708526241914101760">via</a>) <blockquote>"The problem was that if the subsistence base was capable of supporting the population entirely, colonial subjects would not be compelled to offer their labor-power for sale. Colonial governments thus required alternative means for compelling the population to work for wages. The historical record is clear that one very important method for accomplishing this was to impose a tax and require that the tax obligation be settled in colonial currency. This method had the benefit of not only forcing people to work for wages, but also of creating a value for the colonial currency and monetizing the colony. In addition, this method could be used to force the population to produce cash crops for sale. What the population had to do to obtain the currency was entirely at the discretion of the colonial government, since it was the sole source of the colonial currency." —Matthew Forstater on monetizing colonial Africa from <i><a href="http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/Forstater/papers/Forstater2005/RiPE%20Forstater.pdf">Taxation and Political Accumulation</a></i> (pdf)</blockquote>
some excerpts...
<ul><li><i><b>the role of the banking system:</b></i> "Banks' incentives are to subsume all spheres of human activity into income-generating enterprises to which funds can be profitably advanced. It's an overstatement and a bit conspiratorial to say that banks are 'responsible' for the increasing colonization of all aspects of life by market management and control. But their incentives are certainly consistent with these developments."</li>
<li><i><b>fiat money is an activity, not a thing:</b></i> "For the most part, real economic value cannot be stored, it must be produced and reproduced every day. Money as a store of value is a convenience, an easy, durable claim on future value. But it is only a claim. That future value will still need to be produced."</li>
<li><i><b>how fiat fails:</b></i> Fiat fails when the sovereign that manages it fails... Fiat failure is never due to 'printing' alone. It represents an imbalance between printing and capacity."</li>
<li><i><b>in conclusion:</b></i> "The serious problems with fiat currency are <i>ethical</i>. Fiat currency management is an incredible lever for social control, and people at the center, in government or in the banking system, have many opportunities for corrupt self-dealing... Improving on fiat currencies, via cryptocurrencies or any other means, is a worthy project. But I hope you'll understand how fiat currencies work — and they do work — and focus on remedying their serious ethical deficiencies."</li></ul>
on that note...
<ul><li><a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-15/the-chilling-math-of-inequality">How does inequality 'freeze' an economy?</a> - "Some European physicists <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07300">have used</a> a [random exchange network] model to examine how a significant change in inequality affects the overall level of exchange... What they find is troubling, although not all that surprising -- rising inequality tends to undermine exchange."</li>
<blockquote>The researchers found another interesting effect -- a "trickle up" flow of wealth quite different from the usual "trickle down" picture of supply-side economics. In an economy with appreciable inequality, capital tends to flow from those with less to those with more, generating a cascade of transactions along the way. Hence, policy interventions aiming to spur economic activity should work better if they inject money into the system at the lower end, rather than from the top...
Central bankers might have a more powerful and beneficial effect if they instead injected money directly into the accounts of citizens, who could then use it to pay down debts or spend as they like. The idea of such "people's quantitative easing" is <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/03/social-credit-is-the-answer.html">gaining popularity</a>, and for <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-31/monetary-policy-for-the-next-recession">good reason</a>. It would more directly attack the budget constraints holding back the vast number of individuals on whom economic growth depends.</blockquote>
<li><a href="http://equitablegrowth.org/23756-2/">Social credit is the answer</a> - "The solution is obvious: Social Credit. Adopt the policies of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Social_Credit_Party">Social Credit Party of Alberta</a> in the 1930s. Adopt the policies of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Poverty_in_California_movement">Upton Sinclair's campaign for Governor of California</a> in the 1930s. Adopt the policies that are taken as a matter of course and are in the background of Robert A. Heinlein's 1947 novel <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_This_Horizon">Beyond This Horizon</a></i>."</li>
<blockquote>Central banks should, instead of taking all the revenue from seigniorage they create and transferring it all back to the Treasury, calculate each quarter how much of the seigniorage they hold should be distributed to citizens in the form of that quarter's helicopter drop. I am not certain about how the legal-institutional constraints bind the BoJ, and ECB, and the BoE. I believe that the Federal Reserve could start such a policy régime today:
<ol><li>Incorporate–for free–everybody with a Social Security number as a bank holding company.</li>
<li>Let everybody then have their personal bank holding company join–again for free–the Federal Reserve system as a member bank.</li>
<li>Offer every such personal bank holding company a permanent long-term open-ended infinite-duration zero-interest line-of-credit to draw on, up to some set maximum nominal amount.</li>
<li>Raise the amount of the line-of-credit maximum every quarter by that quarter's desired helicopter drop.</li></ol>
<br>The same institutional forces that have, since the selection Paul Volcker, kept the Federal Reserve focused on avoiding an inflationary spiral would still bind. There would be no way to gimmick such a Social Credit system to turn it into a giveaway to the bankers. It would give the Federal Reserve the power to engage in the one policy that nearly all economists are confident will always have traction on nominal demand. Once the Federal Reserve was off and rolling, other central banks would, I think, quickly find mechanisms within their current institutional-legal competence to accomplish the same ends.</blockquote>
<li><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/03/13/central-banks-beat-bitcoin-at-own-game-with-rival-supercurrency/">Central banks beat Bitcoin at own game with rival supercurrency</a> - "A central bank <a href="https://boingboing.net/2016/03/15/a-typical-day-in-a-blockchain.html">crypto-currency</a> is coming soon, leap-frogging Bitcoin, and that spells <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/425cb3ca-e480-11e5-a09b-1f8b0d268c39.html">big trouble</a> for the finance industry."</li>
<li><a href="http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/40/the-financial-system-of-the-future/">The Financial System of the Future</a> - "In this context, two relatively new interrelated ideas hold considerable appeal: that central banks should issue their own <a href="https://taler.net/">digital currency</a>; and that financial transactions more broadly could be recorded on a <a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2016/3/13/the-weekend-re">decentralized ledger</a>."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/new-zealand-plan-to-give-everyone-a-citizens-wage-and-scrap-benefits-a6932136.html">New Zealand plans to give everyone a 'citizen's wage' and scrap benefits</a> - "We are keen to have that debate about whether <a href="https://medium.com/basic-income/deep-learning-is-going-to-teach-us-all-the-lesson-of-our-lives-jobs-are-for-machines-7c6442e37a49">the time has arrived</a> for us to have a system that is seamless, easy to pass through, [with a] guaranteed <a href="http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2016/03/15/basic-income-a-radical-idea-for-eliminating-poverty/">basic income</a> and [where] you can move in and out of work on a regular basis."</li></ul>
more from SRW...
<ul><li><a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2015/09/ethereumsv-ubi-talk-light-reedit.pdf">Perspectives on a Universal Basic Income</a> (pdf) - "A sociotechnological dividend: There is no evidence that today's 'winners' work harder or need to work harder than the extraordinary innovators or businessmen of the past. The vast increase in wealth that comes from a relatively few getting an ever greater share of an ever larger pie is not 'economically efficient' (i.e. necessary to inspire production and growth), but simply a matter of happenstance. If this is right, then the economic case for <a href="https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1108/ethercasts-engineering-economic-security">changing our institutions</a> to alter this happenstance, not-so-great outcome is strong. Giving everybody a '<a href="https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1920/ethercasts-cryptoasset-valuation-for-designers">property right</a>' on an equal share of some portion of aggregate output is a facially fair way to change our institutions in a way that resonates and is consistent with our practice of modern capitalism. The dividend stream generated by such a universal shareholding would look identical to a universal basic income."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/1357.html">MMT stabilization policy</a> - "A government's solvency constraint ultimately lies in its <a href="http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2013/12/making-institutions.html">political capacity</a> to levy and enforce the payment of taxes [which] depends first and foremost on the quality of the <a href="https://growthecon.com/blog/Savings/">real economy</a> it superintends. The value that a government is <a href="http://soberlook.com/2014/01/why-do-we-pay-taxes.html">capable of taxing</a> if necessary to sustain the value of its obligations increases with the value produced overall. A government that wishes to be solvent should first and foremost interact with the polity in a manner that promotes productivity. Secondly, the <a href="http://observer.com/2011/05/maybe-history-ended-after-all-reconsidering-fukuyama/">political capacity</a> to levy taxes depends upon either the legitimacy of or the coercive power of the state. A government that wishes to sustain the value of its obligations must either gain the consent of those it would tax or maintain an infrastructure of compulsion... I like to imagine excessively coercive regimes are inconsistent with overall productivity."</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.157955Thu, 17 Mar 2016 01:56:18 -0800kliulessCumulative and Compounding Opportunity Costshttp://www.metafilter.com/157471/Cumulative%2Dand%2DCompounding%2DOpportunity%2DCosts
<a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2016/03/we-out-here/">How do you quantify the effects of things that don't happen to you?</a> "The whole point of living in a culture is that much of the <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/">labor of perception and judgment</a> is done for you, <a href="http://www.epicenecyb.org/archives/date/2016/02#post-17065">spread through media</a>, and absorbed through an imperceptible process that has no single author." (<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/search.mefi?site=mefi&q=Wesley+Yang">previously</a>; <a href="http://www.epicenecyb.org/archives/date/2016/02#post-17150">via</a>) tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.157471Sat, 27 Feb 2016 12:34:55 -0800kliulessWitness the Firepower of This Fully Armed and Operational Battle Stationhttp://www.metafilter.com/157382/Witness%2Dthe%2DFirepower%2Dof%2DThis%2DFully%2DArmed%2Dand%2DOperational%2DBattle%2DStation
<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9b3c71f8-d97f-11e5-a72f-1e7744c66818.html">Helicopter drops might not be far away</a> - "<a href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/Speeches/2002/20021121/default.htm#f18">Central banks</a> could be <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/02/23/2154053/guest-post-the-fed-is-not-ready-for-the-next-recession/">given the power</a> to <a href="http://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/2016/02/evans-pritchard-on-negative-interest.html">send money</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/702165557286563840">ideally</a> in <a href="http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/139894253546/helicopter-drops-of-money-are-not-the-answer">electronic form</a>, to <a href="http://continuations.com/post/137280302340/basic-income-update">every</a> adult <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen's_dividend">citizen</a>. <a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/02/is-5-growth-possible.html">Would</a> this <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiHi7rD64_LAhVGwmMKHVUaCacQqQIIHjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F3%2Fe162d444-d973-11e5-98fd-06d75973fe09.html&usg=AFQjCNHNYOZS1MGBE8vttPqPxrgI3WKAXA&sig2=sM5Wd9wP0PixpcLYG_uIxQ">add to demand</a>? <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/kocherlakota009/home/policy/thoughts-on-policy/2-23-16">Absolutely</a>." tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.157382Wed, 24 Feb 2016 01:01:20 -0800kliulessThe Gilded Age, Henry George, the Land Value Tax and the Progressive Erahttp://www.metafilter.com/157255/The%2DGilded%2DAge%2DHenry%2DGeorge%2Dthe%2DLand%2DValue%2DTax%2Dand%2Dthe%2DProgressive%2DEra
<a href="http://techcrunch.com/author/kim-mai-cutler/">Kim-Mai Cutler</a>: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/29/nothing-like-this-has-ever-happened-before/">Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before</a> - "San Francisco Bay Area poverty rates in all nine counties have increased in the last economic cycle, even with the Facebook and Twitter IPOs and private tech boom. The main transfer mechanism is land and housing costs, as rising rents and evictions push service and other low-wage workers to the brink. [<a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_George">Henry</a>] George's solution was a single land tax that would replace all other government revenue sources. If an owner wanted to develop their property to make it more useful or productive, George argued that they should have the right to keep the value from those efforts. But increases in the value of underlying land were created by — and ultimately belonged to — the public at large." (<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/41394/Dont-Tax-You-Dont-Tax-Me">previously</a>: <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/138340/A-Report-From-The-Front">1</a>,<a href="www.metafilter.com/146010/East-of-Palo-Altos-Eden">2</a>,<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/101129/A-turning-point-in-economic-development">3</a>) <blockquote>Because no one could create land, it would be impossible to tax it out of existence. In contrast, property taxes disincentivize people from using land more productively, since re-developing land leads to higher re-assessments. A century later, Nobel Prize winner <a href="http://www.henrygeorgefoundation.org/sp-427/newsflash/joseph-stiglitz-endorses-henry-george.html">Joseph Stiglitz would prove out</a> a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem">Henry George theorem</a>, showing that in certain cases increased investment in public goods boosted land rents by at least that much. This suggests that land taxes alone could be enough to sustain public or government expenditures. Milton Friedman would call them the "least bad tax," while Karl Marx called George's ideas "capitalist's last ditch" with a hint of friendly contempt.
George would publish these ideas in his seminal work "<a href="http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm">Progress and Poverty</a>,"[<a href="https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Progress%20and%20Poverty_3.pdf">pdf</a>] which would go on to sell several million copies and kick off the Progressive Era. "<a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPP.html">Progress and Poverty</a>" captured the zeitgeist of the times. The parallels between the late 19th century Gilded Age, named after a Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner novel about a speculative land deal gone awry, and the modern era are striking...
A missing piece of [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlota_Perez">Carlota</a>] Perez's work, that often goes underemphasized by the private investment community, is the <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/08/barry-eichengreen-secular-stagnation-the-long-viewhttppubsaeaweborgdoipdfplus101257aerp20151104-americ.html">role of government in creating an equitable framework that allows everyone to participate</a> in benefits of technological change. This is not an argument in favor of big government for big government's sake; it's to point out that when technology changes the complexity or structure of society, citizens have to push public institutions to transform themselves too.
"Golden ages are not brought by markets alone," Perez told me. "Historically, they have never done it." If Perez is right, the polarization and disillusionment obvious in the 2016 presidential primaries through the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is just the beginning of something else. <a href="https://twitter.com/nick_bunker/status/700339034875367424">Broad institutional</a> and <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/11022104/iraq-war-neoconservatives">governmental change</a> is what the Gilded Age triggered in the ensuing Progressive Era. George's ideas would echo for many decades and influenced an entire generation of leaders from Leo Tolstoy to Sun Yat Sen to George Bernard Shaw.</blockquote>
<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/a-long-game/">A Long Game</a> - "A new generational land cartel has emerged with Californian Baby Boomers protecting entitlements and higher property values for themselves in the form of land-use restrictions and Proposition 13. Global capital has been subverting and taking advantage of these favorable legal and taxation protections on real estate in a extremely low interest-rate world. All of this has <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-s-strange-detour-from-paradise-to-6489844.php">come at the cost of the state's working and middle class</a> and its future workforce."
<a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html">Home is where the cartel is</a> - "Homeowners <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/305glaeser.1.html?pagewanted=all">understand their actions</a> not as <i>monopolizing the housing market</i> but as <i>protecting their homes and neighborhoods from the market</i>. The libertarian 'deregulatory' rhetoric by which market urbanists sometimes make their case is counterproductive."[<a href="http://marketurbanism.com/2015/12/26/a-response-to-interfluidity/">1</a>,<a href="http://tinyletter.com/mattyglesias/letters/what-s-driving-me-is-driving-you">2</a>]
also btw...
<ul><li><a href="https://twitter.com/CoreyRobin/status/691273754324946945">Red Vienna lives</a> - "A unique system nearly a century in the making has created a situation today in which the city government of Vienna either owns or directly influences almost half the housing stock in the capital city. As a result, residents enjoy high-quality apartments with inexpensive rent, along with renters' rights that would be unheard of in the U.S. Viennese have decided that housing is a human right so important that it shouldn't be left up to the free market."</li>
<li><a href="http://equitablegrowth.org/whats-happened-to-u-s-housing-inequality/">What's happened to U.S. housing inequality?</a> - "Over the past year or so, economists have been paying more attention to the role of housing in economic inequality in the United States. Many have pointed to the value of housing as the prime reason for the decline in the share of income going to labor. Research by Matt Rognlie of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology <a href="http://economics.mit.edu/files/10924">finds</a> that the increase in the share of income going to capital since 1948 has gone entirely to housing... it looks as though the main driver of the rise in the housing inequality is the value that people are putting on different neighborhoods. Increased housing segregation seems to be the main culprit, as the rich decide to use their increased income to live in rich neighborhoods, which in turn increases housing inequality."</li>
<li><a href="http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/blog/are-economists-in-denial-about-whats-driving-the-inequality-trainwreck">Are Economists in Denial About What's Driving the Inequality Trainwreck?</a> - "You may see a lot of towers owned by new billionaires along Manhattan's 57th street, but real estate is not the major contributor to wealth inequality. Rather, in Manhattan, the Bay area, London, and similar places, incredibly expensive real estate is a symptom of wealth that has been accumulated by other means."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-04/your-landlord-hurts-growth-and-aggravates-inequality">Your Landlord Is a Drag on Growth</a> - "After many decades of essentially ignoring the role of land, economists are starting to reconsider. Some are worried that landlords are <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-09/the-threat-coming-by-land">hurting growth</a> by making it too expensive to live in highly productive cities. Now, some are starting to think about how land figures in the rise in inequality."</li>
<li><a href="https://journals.law.stanford.edu/stanford-law-policy-review/print/volume-25/issue-1/new-exclusionary-zoning">The New Exclusionary Zoning</a> - "If low-income families can't afford the suburbs and the cities, where should they go? For the first time in American history, it makes sense to talk about whole regions of the country "gentrifying"—whole metropolitan areas whose high housing costs have rendered them inhospitable to low-income families, who, along with solidly middle class families, also feeling the crunch, have been paying higher housing costs or migrating to low-housing cost (and low-wage) areas like Texas, Arizona, or North Carolina. Underlying both of these phenomena—high housing costs in the suburbs and high housing costs in the cities—is a relatively straightforward problem of supply and demand. A city's ability to remain affordable depends most crucially on its ability to expand housing supply in the face of increased demand. Among the people who care most about high housing costs there is a lack of understanding of the main causes and the policy approaches that can address them. The central message of this Article is that the housing advocacy community—from the shoe-leather organizer to the academic theoretician—needs to abandon its reflexively anti-development sentiments and embrace an agenda that accepts and advocates for increased housing development of all types as a way to blunt rising housing costs in the country's most expensive markets."</li>
<li><a href="https://readplaintext.com/how-technological-innovation-can-massively-reduce-the-cost-of-living-91766dc83691">How technological innovation can massively reduce the cost of living</a> - "Part of the cost of shelter is the land, and part is the cost of the building. Putting aside, at least for purposes of this article, fanciful schemes to create more land, the amount of land available is approximately fixed. This means that there are three ways to reduce the cost of shelter: 1) build more densely (i.e., share expensive land between more households), 2) reduce the cost of construction, and 3) make currently cheap and underutilized land more accessible and useful."</li>
<li><a href="http://cityobservatory.org/in-some-cities-the-housing-construction-boom-is-starting-to-pay-off/">Supply and demand still works</a> - "Build more housing and rents fall. Rents in Seattle, Denver, and Washington, DC appear to be easing significantly. In what a local business paper describes as an 'alarming deterioration'—though renters probably have different words for it—the average Seattle rent fell by $59 in the last quarter of 2015, following a long period of rapid increases. Not coincidentally, vacancies also increased by a full percentage point."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/02/the-rise-of-renting-in-the-us/462948/">The Steady Rise of Renting</a> - "In the aftermath of the economic crisis, renters have been caught in a devastating bind as rents have risen while incomes decline. Average rents increased by 22.3 percent between 2006 to 2014, while average incomes declined by 5.8 percent."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/01/sprawl-social-mobility-ewing-chetty-krugman/431535/">Where Sprawl Makes It Tougher to Rise Up the Social Ranks</a> - "Dense metros tend to offer more economic opportunity than less compact cities do."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/02/happiness-tip-day-ditch-commute">Happiness Tip of the Day: Ditch the Commute</a> - "One final point: behavioral economics tells us that we quickly get used to big houses but we never get used to commuting. So when you have a choice, go for the smaller house closer to work."</li></ul> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.157255Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:21:45 -0800kliulessConcrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policyhttp://www.metafilter.com/157198/Concrete%2DEconomics%2DThe%2DHamilton%2DApproach%2Dto%2DEconomic%2DGrowth%2Dand%2DPolicy
<a href="http://fortune.com/2016/02/16/hamilton-jefferson-economy-america/">Why Hamilton—Not Jefferson—Is the Father of the American Economy</a> - "How we can <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/699763984803635200" title="'New Industrialism'?">better energize</a> America's economy, create more jobs, and provide more fulfilling lives for our citizens?" By <a href="http://www.moaf.org/events/general/evt_20160510">Stephen Cohen</a> and <a href="http://bradford-delong.com/">Brad DeLong</a> (<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/88783/American-declinism">previously</a>; [<a href="https://fold.cm/read/delong/stephen-s-cohen-and-j-bradford-delong-forthcoming-2016-concrete-economics-KJKjugQF">unfinished</a>] <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=BJ5uCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover">book</a> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=BXoyBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover">preview</a>) Because what we're doing now isn't working...
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/02/12/how-the-united-states-built-a-welfare-state-for-the-wealthy/">How the United States built a welfare state for the wealthy</a> - "The United States government spends more on social welfare programs per capita than most European countries once we include both traditional public spending and tax subsidies. But contrary to European welfare states, benefits are not concentrated on the poor in the U.S." (<a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/698213858570170368">via</a>)
also btw...
-<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/How-the-Monkey-Cage-Went-Ape/234821">How the Monkey Cage Went Ape</a>
-<a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/697956862637899776">SRW</a>: "The <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/697922627923374080">most entitled</a> people in the world refer to what the <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/698123105365938177">least entitled</a> get as '<a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/698121528886452225">entitlements</a>.' "
-"<a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/698124338025750528">Building the world's most open and diverse social democracy would be an exceptional American project</a>. <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/697914152631685120">Could Sanders' 'democratic socialism' be that</a>?"
-<a href="https://storify.com/pkedrosky/conversation-with-richard-florida">Key quote</a>: "The public has concluded that our 20th century institutions are incapable of dealing with 21st century challenges."
-"Blue states subsidizing public goods while red states free ride, <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/699756520095895552">as usual</a>..."
<a href="http://evonomics.com/">Evonomics</a>: another approach...
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/my-journey-to-economic-morder/">My Journey to Economic Mordor, and the Woman Who Saved Us</a>
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/the-search-for-a-better-economics-part-ii-of-my-journey/">The Search for a Better Economics</a>
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/is-this-the-future-of-econ/">Is This the Future of Economics?</a>
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/the-economics-of-me/">Why the Economics Of "Me" Can't Replace the Economics Of "We"</a>
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/why-liberals-and-conservatives-fail-to-understand/">What Liberals and Conservatives Need to Know About the Welfare State</a>
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/why-economist-ignore-much-of-rich-peoples-income/">Why Economists Ignore Much of Rich People's Income</a>
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/why-economists-dont-know-how-to-think-about-growth/">Why Economists Don't Know How to Think About Growth</a>
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-greatest-cooperators/">How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth</a>
-<a href="http://evonomics.com/the-invisible-hand-wont-solve-the-climate-crisis-capitalism-must-evolve/">The Invisible Hand Won't Solve the Climate Crisis</a> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.157198Tue, 16 Feb 2016 18:28:59 -0800kliulessRadio 2.0?http://www.metafilter.com/157073/Radio%2D20
<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/anchor-launches-to-take-radio-to-the-next-level/">Anchor</a> , which seems to be to audio what Twitter is to writing or Instagram to photography, launched a few days ago as a new "truly public" radio where everyone can contribute and comment. "<a href="https://anchor.fm/">Anchor</a> is a free iPhone app that makes it easy to broadcast short audio clips to a global audience in seconds. Your listeners can talk back, sparking instant group conversations that were never before possible. When not recording, listen to authentic humor, knowledge, inspiration, and debate from Anchor's global collective of personality." Broadcasters can post 2 min audio clips, recorded using the app, and commenters can respond with 1 min clips. tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.157073Fri, 12 Feb 2016 11:47:48 -0800cubbyPlatform Cooperatives: Money as a (Public) Servicehttp://www.metafilter.com/157028/Platform%2DCooperatives%2DMoney%2Das%2Da%2DPublic%2DService
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/international/in-sweden-a-cash-free-future-nears.html">In Sweden, a Cash-Free Future Nears</a> - "Few places are tilting toward a cashless future as quickly as Sweden, which has become hooked on the convenience of paying by app and plastic." <blockquote>Mr. Eriksson, who now heads the Association of Swedish Private Security Companies, a lobbying group for firms providing security for cash transfers, accuses banks and credit card companies of trying to "price cash out of the market" to make way for cards and electronic payments, which generate fee income.</blockquote>So <a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2016/1/16/the-weekend-read-jan-16">forget about Bitcoin</a> and <a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2015/12/20/the-weekend-read-in-review-dec-20">blockchains</a> for a moment. Why should private banks and credit card companies get to control payment systems and generate <strike>tolls</strike> <strike>rents</strike> fees from them, while central banks provide <a href="http://www.frbsf.org/cash/cash-lifecycle/federal-reserve-bank-cash-operations-infographic">cash management services</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_gross_settlement">real-time gross settlement</a> for banks <a href="http://www.frbsf.org/cash/publications/fed-notes/2013/august/robust-efficient-cash-system-changing-landscape">nearly free</a>?*
<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/3/eab39a48-c860-11e5-be0b-b7ece4e953a0.html">Time for a digital government mint</a> - "E-cash for the people: Phase out cash, phase in official digital money"
<blockquote>Two profound changes are under way in our attitudes towards money, both of which could in short order transform how most of us deal with the banking system, and indeed how the system itself works. The first trend is a growing preference for electronic means of payment over cash. The other is the growing push for central banks themselves to issue electronic money for use by individuals...
Wrapping one's head around the difference between official versus private money is a lot harder than understanding the distinction between physical and electronic money — but it is also essential for making informed judgments about financial and monetary policy (we have previously <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/3/0945e8d0-0b6f-11e5-994d-00144feabdc0.html">explained why</a>). Well done, therefore, to Positive Money, which has just published a report arguing how and why <a href="http://positivemoney.org/publications/digital-cash-why-central-banks-should-start-issuing-electronic-money-new-report/">official digital currency should be introduced</a> in the UK. The thoughtful and thorough report qualifies as essential reading.
The general idea is for the Bank of England (or other central banks; the ideas are general) to offer deposit accounts directly to the public, or alternatively, for private banks to offer accounts <a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/681874967709917185">fully backed</a> by central bank reserves. The authors go through the mechanics of how this would work, and address the main objections. We only discuss the most important of these here (but do read the whole report), which is that the system may work too well.
Too well, that is, in that people would convert a very large share of their current bank deposits into official digital money, in effect taking them out of the private banking system. Why might this be a problem? [P]eople may prefer the safety of central bank accounts even in normal times. That would destroy private banks' current deposit-funded model. Is that a bad thing? They would still have a role as direct intermediators between savers and borrowers, by offering investment products sufficiently attractive for people to get out of the safety of e-cash. Meanwhile, the broad money supply would be <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/146351/Death-of-Banks">more directly under the control</a> of the central bank, whereas now it's a product of the vagaries of private lending decisions. The more of the broad money supply that was in the form of official digital cash, <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/695647324698071040">the easier it would be</a>, <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-01/japan-experiments-with-interest-rates-of-less-than-zero">for example</a>, for the central bank to use tools such as <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/3/0d8f445e-cb27-11e5-a8ef-ea66e967dd44.html">negative interest rates</a> or <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/hsbc-says-the-blockchain-could-be-used-for-radical-central-bank-helicopter-money-policies-2015-11">helicopter drops</a>. Both could be indispensable in the years ahead.</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/DBR_INTERNET_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000368569.pdf#page=8">Fedcoin—how banks can survive blockchains</a> (<a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2015/10/25/the-weekend-read-oct-25">via</a>)
<blockquote>If the <a href="http://andolfatto.blogspot.com/2015/11/bitcoin-and-central-banking.html">Fedcoin</a> took off, it would appear to be the death knell for credit card providers and deposit-taking institutions. Banks would have two options to avoid economic obsolescence. The first would be to transition toward a pure investment banking strategy, financed entirely via equity and long-term debt raised from savers aware of the risk they were taking. Indeed, this is the model favoured by neo-classical economists harking back to the ideas of Irving Fisher.
A second option would be to attract Fedcoin deposits by providing services such as verification for know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering rules or secure digital wallets or even just the most user-friendly apps. Banks could compete for Fedcoin deposits by issuing their own blockchains, at par with Fedcoin. <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21689636-why-havent-banking-giants-got-lot-smaller-chop-chop">Deutsche Bank</a>,[<a href="http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2013/11/Wages-vs-productivity.png">1</a>,<a href="http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/images/print-edition/20160130_FNC492.png">2</a>] for example, could issue dbCoin, which customers use to settle transactions with any counterparty, much like a digital chequebook. Banks would guarantee convertibility of their digital currencies into Fedcoin, and central banks offer clearing and settlement facilities.
This brings us full circle back to today's system, but with a couple of important exceptions. For starters, the difference between the monetary base and bank-created, branded money would be considerably clearer. More important, perhaps, the technological obsolescence of deposit-taking institutions engenders greater economic competitiveness. The banking sector would no longer be rewarded for processing payments or managing current accounts. It would have to compete for deposits by offering better services and ultimately greater responsibility for the money it creates.</blockquote>
<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/26/are-banks-destined-to-become-the-next-dumb-pipes/">Are Banks Destined To Become The Next "Dumb Pipes"?</a> (<a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2015/10/31/the-halloween-read-oct-31">via</a>)
<blockquote>The telcos hate the term "dumb pipes" — and for good reason. They are being relegated to the common conduits through which meaningful communications and commerce take place. But telcos won't go away overnight because there's still a lot of value in the physical network infrastructure and cell towers they built through decades of investment.
Similarly, "unbundled" banks won't go away overnight; there's still a lot of value in the intra-bank money transfer networks and the depository role that banks are uniquely allowed to play in the U.S. economy. However, over time, traditional banks that fail to dramatically reinvent themselves for modern consumers will find themselves playing the role of a simple inbox for depository funds and pipes that move the money to other financial services providers who will increasingly influence consumers' financial lives.</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fiatcoin-redefining-banks-banking-pascal-bouvier-cfa">Fiatcoin, redefining Banks and Banking</a> (<a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2016/1/24/the-weekend-read-jan-24">via</a>)
<blockquote>What of cross border transactions? Would various central banks use the same consensus technology stack with same or similar features (consensus algorithm, network topology, monetary policy scripting) thereby ensuring optimal interoperability? Would central banks introduce a tiered approach with a shared metafiatcoin only available and transacted amongst themselves (hello IMF and SDRs) linked to country or country unions' specific fiatcoins (fedcoin, eurocoin...)
Until fiatcoin would be made available to the public - and I am also convinced this will happen sooner than we think - how would financial institutions intermediate between fiatcoin and physical currencies (physical or digital cash)?</blockquote>
also btw...
-<a href="https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/690615963872550915">The Digitization of Finance</a>[<a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-in-talks-with-u-s-banks-to-develop-mobile-person-to-person-payment-service-1447274074">1</a>,<a href="https://www.iif.com/publication/research-note/modernizing-money-management-how-technology-transforming-asset-and-wealth">2</a>,<a href="http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2016/01/what-is-getting-too-little-attention.html">3</a>]
-<a href="http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/event/future-money">The Future of Money</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/02/05/2151931/digital-money-negative-rates-as-gosplan-2-0/">Digital money, negative rates as Gosplan 2.0</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/29/2151327/rtgs-and-the-story-of-batches-instead-of-blocks/">RTGS, and the story of batches instead of blocks</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/02/01/2151882/rtgs-and-the-story-of-collateralised-risk-instead-of-credit-risk/">RTGS, and the story of collateralised risk instead of credit risk</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5eb91614-bee5-11e5-846f-79b0e3d20eaf.html">Fintech: Search for a super-algo</a>[<a href="https://twitter.com/izakaminska/status/687381296541220864" title="If we replace central planners with an AI central planner who draws data from private info, does that stop it being a command economy?">1</a>,<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/02/02/2151940/why-humanitys-rorkes-drift-falling-to-computer-zulus-matters/">2</a>]
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/08/2149650/fintech-paradoxes-blacklist-edition/">Fintech paradoxes, blacklist edition</a>[<a href="https://twitter.com/izakaminska/status/687373326176677888" title="Paying with Paypal means sharing your purchase data for future targeted marketing.">*</a>]
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/15/2150403/scaling-and-why-unicorns-cant-survive-without-it/">Scaling, and why unicorns can't survive without it</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/02/10/2152935/on-unicorn-imperialism/">On unicorn imperialism</a>
-<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/02/10/2152601/on-the-hypothetical-eventuality-of-no-more-free-internet/">On the hypothetical eventuality of no more free internet</a>
-<a href="http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2016/02/the-rise-of-the-platform-economy.html">The Rise of the Platform Economy</a>
-<a href="http://agaric.com/blogs/putting-powerful-platforms-under-cooperative-control">Putting powerful platforms under cooperative control</a>: "People gathered to talk about the problems of an online economy reliant on monopoly, extraction, and surveillance—and discuss how to build a cooperative Internet, built of platforms owned and governed by the people who rely on them." (<a href="http://thelongandshort.org/growth/this-house-proposes-that-we-nationalise-uber">This house proposes that we nationalise Uber</a>)
So now onto (more hype about) Bitcoin/blockchains:
<ul><li><a href="http://www.wired.com/2016/01/project-aims-to-unite-bitcoin-with-other-online-currencies/">The Plan to Unite Bitcoin With All Other Online Currencies</a> - "The idea is to create a single worldwide network that can not only unite all digital currencies, but all companies and individuals who use those currencies."</li>
<blockquote>The hope is that the protocol will increase the adoption of online money and, more broadly, let us more efficiently send money from place to place. That's the goal of many existing projects. Ripple and Stellar, for instance, are designed so that you can send any currency and have it arrive as any other currency. You can send <a href="http://suitpossum.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/bitcoin-research-2015.html">bitcoin</a> and have them arrive as litecoin. You can send good ol' US dollars and have them arrive as dogecoin. The rub is that the community of businesses and developers who use these ledgers is limited—and you can't send money from one network to another. The interledger protocol aims to change that. <br><br>In a way, the project is the apotheosis of a decades-long effort to create what you might call "an Internet for money." Back in the early '90s, people like Marc Andreessen, the creator of the Netscape web browser, hoped to create an standard way of sending money across the web. The original hypertext transfer protocol—http, the standard that defined the underpinnings of the web—actually included a code for payments. Though this was never used, many outfits in recent years have tried at least to create a de facto standard for online money...</blockquote>
<li><a href="http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2015/12/linux-foundation-unites-industry-leaders-advance-blockchain">Linux Foundation Unites Industry Leaders to Advance Blockchain Technology</a> - "The project will develop an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and free developers to focus on building robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support business transactions." (<a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2015/12/20/the-weekend-read-in-review-dec-20">via</a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/@gavofyork/so-ethereum-is-released-4291da46b770">The three pillars of a crypto-law ecosystem: Identity, Assets, Data</a> - "Just as the <i>GNU</i> portion of <i>GNU/Linux</i> provides important pieces of software 'infrastructure' for a functional operating system (such as a C library and shell tools), the Ethereum platform, at present, needs this infrastructure before it can be properly exploited. This article is about mapping out and exploring the interrelationships between those pieces and doing so in terms of defining and (re)combining simple primitives."</li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/16-blockchain-technology-predictions-of-2016-2ff0f538895a">Blockchain Technology Predictions</a> - "So while Ethereum — which is presently capable of 25 transaction per second (TPS) — is not in danger of bumping up against difficult scaling issues soon, it will be able to handle many TPS with <a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/01/15/privacy-on-the-blockchain/">Ethereum</a> <a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/12/24/understanding-serenity-part-i-abstraction/">version</a> <a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/12/28/understanding-serenity-part-2-casper/">2.0</a>, levels commensurate with what the Visa and American Express networks." (<a href="http://r3cev.com/blog/2016/1/10/the-weekend-read-jan-10">via</a>)</li>
<li><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/20/2150706/blockchain-hype-storms-davos/">Blockchain hype storms Davos</a> - "Banks know that forging a cartel as strong as that eliminates all possibility of out competing with each other in terms of risk, screening and security. As far as they're concerned, they become one bank (with all the non-diversity risk that comes with monopoly systems). It also means erroneous transactions become nigh impossible to reverse, money supply becomes a constant and scaling is compromised completely. Hence the rage for private blockchains with the promise to provide banks with override options within their special trusted network."</li></ul>
---
*<small><a href="https://www.frbservices.org/servicefees/index.html">Fedwire</a> was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedwire#History">free for members until 1981</a>, <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/01/american-and-chinese-oligarchies.html">effectively subsidizing commercial interests</a>; that is, banks get all these services for next to nothing (at cost, but still at taxpayer expense), presumably to 'grease the wheels of capitalism', but if any of these services were offered to the public -- in the public interest (<a href="http://mathbabe.org/2015/11/04/a-couple-of-quick-links/">postal banking anyone</a>?) -- it would be deemed '<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/156358/How-the-Federal-Reserve-promotes-income-inequality">socialist</a>'. What does it say about capitalist institutions then that practice 'socialism for me, but not for thee'?</small>
<small>oh and fwiw, a quick detour/primer on 'what is money?':
<ul><li><a href="http://jpkoning.blogspot.ca/2016/01/what-makes-money-special-lawyers.html">What makes money special, the lawyer's edition</a> - "Economists like to say that money is unique because it is a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. Lawyers and judges have a different story to tell about money's uniqueness. Unlike goods, money can't be 'followed.' "[<a href="https://twitter.com/jp_koning/status/683877703397707778">1</a>,<a href="https://twitter.com/jp_koning/status/681336432804425728">2</a>,<a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/684324734822006784">3</a>,<a href="https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/678578348570763265">4</a>,<a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/01/15/privacy-on-the-blockchain/">5</a>]</li>
<li><a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/money-as-a-social-construct-and-public-good/">Money as a social construct and public good</a> - "As long as we remain ignorant of how monetary systems operate, for so long will the public good that is money be captured to serve only the interests of the tiny, greedy minority in possession of private wealth."</li>
<blockquote><small>[T]hose who control our money system escape close scrutiny. As a result too, there is widespread public ignorance of how the system for both creating and pricing money is effectively controlled not by central banks, but by the commercial banking system and by private, global capital markets. Despite all the hype around central bank decision-making, the public authorities have little impact on the management of the global financial system. <br><br>Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of academic neglect of money and monetary systems is the public's failure to appreciate that the monetary systems of advanced economies evolved as a result of great struggles between private wealth and wider, democratic society. The success of these historic struggles meant that monetary systems in advanced economies evolved to become a great public good serving wider interests. However, periodically monetary systems are recaptured by the "robber barons" of private wealth, and then controlled and manipulated to serve their own rapacious greed.</small></blockquote>
<li><a href="http://fermatslibrary.com/s/ideal-money-and-asymptotically-ideal-money">Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money</a> - "[I]f we view money as of importance in connection with transfers of utility, we can see that money itself is a sort of 'utility', using the word in another sense, comparable to supplies of water, electric energy or telecommunications. And then, if we think about it, we can consider the quality of money as comparable to the quality of some 'public utility' like the supply of electric energy or of water."</li></ul>
and how it's created/backed from a MMT (<a href="http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/perry-mehrling-reflects-on-economist-on.html">modern monetary theory</a>) perspective:
<ul><li><a href="http://www.asymptosis.com/where-mmt-gets-its-accounting-wrong-and-right.html">Where MMT Gets Its Accounting Wrong — And Right</a> - "Start by thinking in terms of Household Net Worth. This measure has the virtue of encapsulating and telescoping all private-sector net worth, because households ultimately own firms, at zero or more removes, but firms don't own households (yet...)."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.concertedaction.com/2015/10/07/united-states-net-wealth/">United States' Net Wealth</a> (<a href="http://www.concertedaction.com/2015/10/11/united-states-net-wealth-part-2/">Part 2</a>) - "What does all this mean? Hmm. Not to easy to answer, except saying that familiarity with the system of measurement helps in understanding how the economy works."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6174.html">Translating 'net financial assets'</a> - "I think the economy includes people who are already overinsured by their stock of net financial assets, and those people tend disproportionately to accumulate new issues. So we should think more about how we can accommodate private sector entities' need for some degree of insurance by redistributing existing net financial assets rather than creating new ones."</li>
<li><a href="http://www.philosophyofmoney.net/accounting-as-religion-buffett-derrida-and-mmt/">Accounting as religion: Buffett, Derrida, and MMT</a> - "The ability to pay taxes is a feature of money issued by sovereigns – a very important feature and part of how the government establishes its monopoly in the creation of money, but just because the government accepts money in payment for taxes (what else would they accept?) does not make the money they issue their 'liability.' "</li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/688236959685193728">What's the obligation behind the Fed's 'liabilities'?</a> - "[W]e accept paper money as payment/store of wealth because it is redeemable against our tax obligation as citizens."</li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/689605422114680832">Market Macro Myths: Debts, Deficits, and Delusions</a> - "In the context of the role that debts and deficits play in overall economic policy, in this paper I focus on the philosophy known as 'sound finance', which includes adherents who believe that governments should seek to balance their budgets. I, however, take a different view, and believe that the role of government when dealing with budget deficits should be one of 'functional finance', which ensures that the policies implemented help to reach the overarching goals of macroeconomic policy (generally held to be full employment and price stability)."</li>
<blockquote><small>Myth 1: Governments are like households;<br>
Myth 2: Printing money to finance budget deficits is inflationary;<br>
Myth 3: Budget deficits/high debt <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/15/2147134/do-demographics-dictate-lower-returns-to-capital-and-faster-inflation/">lead to</a> high interest rates;<br>
Myth 4: Budget deficits are unsustainable;<br>
Myth 5: Debt is a burden on future generations</small></blockquote></ul></small> tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.157028Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:34:24 -0800kliulessThe Grief Policehttp://www.metafilter.com/156456/The%2DGrief%2DPolice
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/enter-the-grief-police/424746/">The rise of grief policing. The notion that there is but one way to grieve, and that deviation from that way is wrong.</a> Grief policing was on display recently, during the aftermath of David Bowie's death. Camilla Long, the film critic for The Sunday Times, witnessed the outpouring of emotion posted online as people learned, and tried to make sense, of Bowie's passing. She did not like the way they mourned. Their grieving, she suggested—or, well, "grieving"—was self-indulgent, and, like so much else on social media, purely performative. "Bowie Blubberers," she called the grievers. Grief, in the popular imagination, is a sadness to be experienced and carried and borne as silently and as stoically as possible. And yet mourning, too, has a public face: condolences, wakes, the sharing of memories and sympathies. That juxtaposition leaves many confused about how to celebrate the dead, how to comfort the living—how, in short, to grieve together.
One recent consequence of that collective drifting, especially as the confusion expands to digital platforms, is the rise of grief policing. The notion that there is but one way to grieve, and that deviation from that way is wrong. The tendency to tell mourners that, essentially, they're mourning too much, or not enough. The desire to restore order to a practice that has become, culturally, chaotic. tag:metafilter.com,2016:site.156456Thu, 21 Jan 2016 14:42:18 -0800narancia